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Highlights • The development of a sustainability index model applicable to the Mauritian manufacturing sector. • To identify the key dimensions for sustainability assessment for the Mauritian manufacturing industry. • To include sustainability indicators of Mauritian manufacturing companies into a single multi-dimensional model. Abstract It has been long recognized that environmental matters are important to the survival of manufacturing companies. Yet manufacturing companies continue to degrade the environment, over exploit natural resources and generate unmanageable amount of wastes. Manufacturing is not just about financial returns, but it should also be conscious of the long-term impacts on living standards of both present and future generations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a sustainability index to quantify the impact of Mauritian manufacturing activities on the environment. This research is an attempt to stimulate manufacturing companies in Mauritius to report their organization's sustainability via an index that shall aid in driving both profits and growth. It reviews the main social, economic and environmental issues affecting manufacturing companies and provides a Sustainability Index Model (SIM) that can be used as a sustainability performance measurement indicator, helping in the mitigation of perennial business challenges. The derived sustainability index, that combines the principal sustainable indicators quoted in the literature, has been used as a single decision-making tool for assisting manufacturing companies realize sustainable development goals. A sample of 30 large manufacturing companies in Mauritius were used to validate the sustainability index model. The study reveals an index with 9 environmental, 4 economic and 2 social indicators which were pertinent in sustainability measurement, with varying degree of importance, within the Mauritian manufacturing context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable management of soils is needed to accomplish many of the United Nations⿿ Sustainable Development Goals, but it can be problematic in practice as soils are complex and to manage them sustainably requires the co-operation of multiple stakeholders on various level of society. We present the outcome of a transdisciplinary approach towards indicator development, where we created a set of soil indicators for sustainable development with stakeholder group participation from scientists, policymakers and soil practitioners. The groups evaluated 49 indicators, through a Delphi survey technique, and selected a set of 30 indicators. Of these 14 were common to all stakeholder groups and represented a final set of core soil indicators for sustainable development. The Delphi survey did suffer from high attrition rate and low response rate, especially among the policy makers, which limits somewhat its findings. Nevertheless, the survey illustrated the usefulness of relevant stakeholder involvement in an indicator development process and the role of survey based instruments in aiding the selection of common indicators, whilst showing the different views of stakeholders groups. Given that the stakeholder groups have to consider a multitude of variables and impacts on soil and may have different focus and management goals in mind, a process such as this can serve as a starting point for discussion between stakeholder groups on various levels of governance about how to manage soil sustainably and help to fulfil the UN⿿s Sustainable Development Goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the UN in New York the Open Working Group created by the UN General Assembly proposed a set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which comprises 17 goals and 169 targets. Further to that, a preliminary set of 330 indicators was introduced in March 2015. Some SDGs build on preceding Millennium Development Goals while others incorporate new ideas. A critical review has revealed that indicators of varied quality (in terms of the fulfilment certain criteria) have been proposed to assess sustainable development. Despite the fact that there is plenty of theoretical work on quality standards for indicators, in practice users cannot often be sure how adequately the indicators measure the monitored phenomena. Therefore we stress the need to operationalise the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets and evaluate the indicators’ relevance, the characteristic of utmost importance among the indicators’ quality traits. The current format of the proposed SDGs and their targets has laid a policy framework; however, without thorough expert and scientific follow up on their operationalisation the indicators may be ambiguous. Therefore we argue for the foundation of a conceptual framework for selecting appropriate indicators for targets from existing sets or formulating new ones. Experts should focus on the “indicator-indicated fact” relation to ensure the indicators’ relevance in order for clear, unambiguous messages to be conveyed to users (decision- and policy-makers and also the lay public). Finally we offer some recommendations for indicators providers in order to contribute to the tremendous amount of conceptual work needed to lay a strong foundation for the development of the final indicators framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beech forests previously covered substantial areas of the continental region of Europe, however, their current distribution is limited to a small percentage of their former yet still potential range. Many beech forests are now protected under the European Union-wide conservation approach of Natura 2000. We analyse the impact of Natura 2000 on the management of beech forests via social science data on management practices gathered from 73 interviews with local stakeholders within nine case study sites in Austria, France, and Germany, and via an ecological analysis of Natura 2000 management plans (MPs). Our data reveals that the Natura 2000 implementation has had little impact on forest management practices. We found that the Natura 2000 network is well known amongst stakeholders, yet the objectives and measures for beech forest protection are usually vaguely defined in the MPs. According to our interviewees, in many cases this vagueness results in a disregard for the MPs, which hence fail to guide the management of the forests protected under Natura 2000. In addition, when ecological thresholds are included in the MPs, they are often below recommendations based on conservation research. In the case of the structural bio-indicator deadwood, the thresholds given by MPs for a favourable site conservation status were significantly lower than those considered within conservation science to be necessary in order to conserve typical beech forest biodiversity. We conclude that while Natura 2000 has raised awareness of the importance of European beech forests for biodiversity conservation, it needs significant additional efforts to make it an effective policy for forest biodiversity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several methods and ecological indicators are used in environmental economics to analyse the process of sustainable use of natural resources. These approaches are helpful in measuring and assessing the intensity (efficiency) of products' use and their impact on the environment. However, they do not sufficiently reflect the dynamics and improvements in the achieved outcomes as compared to the population (generation) growth. Moreover, they do not allow always analysing product changes on the world level. Referring to this existing gap, we conceptualise a new approach - product generational dematerialisation (PGD) indicator, measuring product efficiency and population changes in relative values, and use it for investigating the dematerialisation for the world energy sector in the last 35 years. The indicator can be used as a new methodical tool to support and evaluate sustainable management policies on the enterprise, regional, national, and international level as well as for different resources, goods, and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]