Abstract
The doughnut economy is a new approach for the inclusion of planetary boundaries and social foundation in the development of societies. The Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN) determine another view for development targets. The developed sustainability window approach provides a means for operationalization and quantification of the doughnut economy. The developed method calculates minimum economic development to guarantee sustainable social development and maximum economic development not to exceed environmental sustainability. The developed method, advanced suitability analysis (ASA) doughnut, is illustrated with case data from Thailand. The sustainability doughnut for Thailand has been calculated for both weak and strong sustainability criteria. It seems that strong sustainability is a too strict requirement regarding several environmental dimensions of development while the weak sustainability criteria are fulfilled. The developed method and tool are flexible and can be used for comparative analysis of different countries or regions, for dynamic analysis of sustainability development, for gap analysis of the required improvement of environmental or social efficiency, and analysis of degrowth possibilities. The selection of indicators for the analyses and their reliability is crucial for the validity of the results and usefulness in policy planning.
Highlights
The sustainability window (SuWi) analysis produces results of the pairwise comparison of different social and environmental indicators in relation to economic development. When these pairwise minimum and maximum economic development results are organized in a radial diagram, we get as a result a doughnut diagram, advanced sustainability analysis (ASA) doughnut, for sustainable development
The minimum economic development determines the inner circle of the doughnut and the maximum defines the outer circle provided that the minimum is smaller than the maximum
The illustrated ASA doughnut can be compared to the actual economic development in the radial diagram
Summary
Sustainability window analysis is based on the advanced sustainability analysis (ASA). The maximum economic development related to weak sustainability (GDPWmax ) is determined by point G Using these indicators, the real GDP growth (GDPreal ) fulfils both the strong and weak sustainability criteria. In this case, we use “healthy life years” as the social indicator and “greenhouse gas emissions” as the environmental indicator referring to strong sustainability criterion. In order to reach sustainability, the efficiency gap in environmental development should be fulfilled by reducing the environmental stress productivity to the value illustrated by line r4 In such a case, we would have a positive sustainability window (SuWieff ) with the maximum economic development (GDPmaxE ). The use of weak sustainability criteria can be justifiable
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