Modeling sustainability

The quantitative modeling of sustainability using an interdisciplinary approach enables us to understand and connect top-down and bottom-up approaches to measure sustainability. The Interdisciplinary approach is very useful to address social problems but is generally limited by the poor understanding of the concepts across the disciplines. For instance, the term ‘disaster resilience’ is understood in different ways in different disciplines. Another challenge of such work is scaling issues. Some models are quite useful to describe community characteristics at the local level but are not helpful while up scaling to regional and national level. The same is true while scaling down global models to understand the intricacies of the systems.

From the evolutionary resilience perspective as put by Dr. Davoudi in her last lecture, the main challenge remains in modeling or quantitatively assessing the intentionality of human actions. In general, quantitative models are overly deterministic which does not allow for human interventions into the systems. In addition, power and politics in the society are so prevailing that a quantitative model cannot accurately predict the relationships. Although, Dr. Little describes about the orientors and indicators to assess and enhance sustainability, the right representation of qualitative social indicators in a social context is always debatable.