The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies

18 May 2012

Recently, The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) entered into a cooperative agreement with the Sustainable Society Foundation (SSF) to further develop the Sustainable Society Index (SSI). The SSI represents a unique benchmarking tool enabling companies, governments and individuals alike to gauge levels of sustainability in an encompassing, easy-to-use and swift manner. The SSI is the only index worldwide which comprises all three main dimensions of wellbeing: Human Wellbeing, Environmental Wellbeing and Economic Wellbeing. It is presented for 151 countries, covering over 99% of the world population. Every two years the SSI is updated; the next update is due for the end of 2012.

The Index allows its users to assess current levels of sustainability, both on a global, as well as on a per-country level. The SSI measures sustainability on the basis of a total of 24 different indicators, each given a score between 0 and 10 and plots the performances of countries and regions in ‘spider-web’ graphs.

The outer circle of the spider web represents full sustainability, a score of 10. The centre of the web represents a score of 0, no sustainability at all. For 2010, the level of sustainability in the world at large was a mere 5.9 out of 10.

In the coming months, HCSS will, together with the SSF, deepen and further strengthen the Index, and work towards assuring its continuity in the years to come.

For more information download the PDF.

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