Measuring Sustainability

Outcomes must be measurable. Governments, environmental and community-based organisations around the world are using the concepts of cumulative impacts, carrying capacity and thresholds to try to determine how much and what forms of economic and leisure development can be sustained in a given area. Such groups are trying to understand at what point development moves from being beneficial to deleterious.

None of this is an exact science, nor is it rigorously and consistently applied around the world.  However, these measures can help all stakeholders gain a better understanding of when development will start to exceed the aesthetic, biological, energy, water and social capacity of our surroundings.

Cumulative impacts

Cumulative impacts result when the effects of one action are added to or interact with other effects. For example, several golf developments in close proximity may give rise to significant landscape or ecological or resource effects in combination, when none would by itself. Analysis of cumulative impacts is important in identifying the carrying capacity of a biodiverse area under threat by humans, known as a hotspot, to accommodate multiple golf developments. Such analysis can also help reveal appropriate thresholds for sustainable development.

Conversely, well-planned, designed and constructed golf facilities, in clusters, can help to preserve the landscape and ecosystem fabric of larger units of land, and bring them under conservation-based management for decades and centuries to follow. Golf can be associated positively with increasing the ecosystem and resource-carrying capacity of a region.

Carrying capacity

Broadly, carrying capacity refers to the amount of an activity or resource use that a system can support sustainably, that without showing economic, social and environmental deterioration and decline in the longer term. This fundamental concept underpins modern-day approaches to sustainable development. Strategic planning now seeks to define the capacity of areas to accommodate various levels of development of different types, and in accumulation.

Carrying capacity studies can be beneficial to developers in anticipating and addressing competition for limited resources and customers. Such studies can also help in phasing development. Energy and water capacities might increase through the use of new technologies, increasing the amount of permitted development.

Thresholds

By better understanding the carrying capacity for golf development for a defined area or region, taking into account its other land and resource use needs, it is possible to begin to identify thresholds for sustainable development. Although not usually precise, given the complexity and subjectivity involved, this concept is increasingly tied to strategic land-use planning decisions. For example, when governments release parcels of land for macro-scale tourism development, they often set a pre-determined ratio for the number of golf courses and density of residential units for that area. Doing so creates a planning framework that protects sensitive and vulnerable ecological and cultural zones. This approach also ensures that soft landscapes will be present amongst harder elements of development.

Threshold-guided plans for development are often of great interest to the local community, which may wish to see economic development and the creation of employment and wealth, but which also wants to protect other valued assets, such as access to greenspace, protection of historical sites and biodiversity hotspots.

A common language for discourse

In many places where concern about the sustainability of golf development exists, the concepts of cumulative impact, carrying capacity, and threshold level can be used to help understand whether the concerns are legitimate or unfounded. Often people simply want to know that thoughtful consideration of environmental issues has guided the types and overall levels of economic and tourism development.

Within reason, the application of the above concepts can help everyone generate an understanding of issues that need to be considered when seeking to evaluate sustainable levels of golf development.

Of course, taking this kind of strategic evaluation approach, it is often the case that justifiably, some sites met with some scales and forms of development model can be deemed ‘unsustainable’. While in many locations, the proper sustainability initiatives, applied correctly, can mitigate environmental damage, in some cases, potential sites are simply too sensitive environmentally or culturally to develop.

The fact that a piece of available land is large enough for a golf development does not mean that a golf development makes sense there. Any number of issues, from the ecology of the site to water issues to traffic congestion, could render the location unsuitable. In some places, too many golf courses may already exist and a new development may oversaturate the area to create a negative environmental or economic impact. However wonderful the sport, we can’t cover the earth’s surface with golf courses.