GISMO Project

Objective

The objective of GISMO is threefold:

• The first objective is to address Quality of Life, taking the distribution, improvement and continuation of Quality of Life as the main outcome of sustainable development.

• The second objective is to develop an integrated framework, to gain insights into underlying dynamics of (un)sustainable development, and to analyse feedbacks, trade-offs and co-benefits within and between the economic, social and environmental domains, as well as within and between time and space.

• The third objective is to analyse the impacts of policy options and interventions in terms of Quality of Life, and its synergies and trade-offs with the environment.

Quality of life

One of the most important ultimate ends of sustainable development is, without any doubt, human well-being or Quality of Life. Well-being and Quality of Life can be considered as interchangeble. Quality of Life is the crucial outcome of underlying processes in the economic, ecologic and social/human domains. Taking the distribution, continuation and improvement of Quality of Life as the main outcome of sustainable development, brings along the issue of how to address Quality of Life in the context of a modelling framework.

Income, education and health seem to be the most important aspects, completed with people’s social structures, such as social cohesion. For these three aspects, various indicators are represented in UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI). Keeping the limitations of the HDI in mind, as well as the options for alternative approaches, the HDI can offer a good point of departure for the exploration of future developments of Quality of Life. Because life expectancy only reflects ‘number of years’, while the quality of those years might be as important, the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) is used as a supplement to life expectancy.

Sustainable Development

One of the most commonly used definitions remains that of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), sometimes referred to as the Brundtland Commission. The WCED report Our Common Future established the link between environment and development issues, and firmly put the term ‘sustainable development’ on the political agenda. WCED defined sustainable development as ‘Development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since then, many refinements, additions and alternatives have been introduced. The use of People-Planet-Profit, representing the respective human, environmental and economic domains of sustainable development, is a useful way to position and analyse feedbacks, trade-offs and co-benefits. A recent initiative are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), an ambitious development agenda for reducing poverty and improving living conditions of the world’s poor.