ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to report Sustainable Calgary's experience in identifying, researching and reporting on a set of social, ecological and economic indicators of sustainability. Sustainable Calgary was founded by a group of educators, university students, engineers, planners, social workers, environmentalists and small business owners, eventually becoming a non-profit society in its own right. Sustainable Calgary is, in large part, a response to the dominance of neo-liberal globalization pursued at the expense of social and ecological sustainability. Identification and documentation of a set of sustainability indicators for Calgary is an immediate output of the Sustainable Calgary indicator initiative. The movement of local sustainability indicator reporting is consistent with a growing realization that cities, regions, nations and the global community all rely upon a solid foundation of sustainable local communities. A dominant theme in sustainability indicator work has been the application of systems thinking to sustainability indicator processes and analysis.
