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NNOVATIVE RESEARCH FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS FOR SMALL AND RURAL COMMUNITIES:
CONCEPT TESTING A NEW APPLICATION
Background
Small towns and rural communities are looking for
ways to strengthen their economies, provide better
quality of life, and build on local assets. They are
creating their own paths to sustainability that enhance
their distinctive characteristics and that fit their size,
geography, and resources. In a series of discussions
with smaller communities (<50,000 residents), EPA
has heard that community leaders want a simple
dashboard or compact set of tools that can help them
assess and improve their sustainability profile.
Sustainability Snapshot Project
In response to this need, EPA's Pacific Northwest
Regional Office (Region 10) and Office of Research
and Development are collaborating with the
Washington State Association of Communities and
interested communities on a Sustainability Snapshot
Project. The project is tailoring existing nationally-
available indicators that use publicly-available data to
match the unique needs of small communities. The
emerging dashboard application is called "Decision
Integration for Strong Communities" or DISC. It
is designed to encourage smart growth and offer
relevant, local, and readily-available information. For
a community with fewer economic or staffing
resources, the sustainability snapshot and toolkits that
DISC provide may help communities know where to
start, build consensus on improvement goals and
projects, and measure changes in the community's
sustainability profile overtime.
Community Engagement
To ensure DISC is useful to a variety of smaller and
rural communities, EPA staff will consult interested
communities and potential users at different steps of
the development process. For example, community
planners from five or six small Oregon and
Washington communities will cooperate in testing a
DISC prototype. If the usability of the prototype
proves successful, EPA may further develop DISC
and make it available as an executable, downloadable
file for beta testing.
Use of Existing Indicators
All of the scientific content available through DISC
will be curated from existing environmental
indicators (nationally consistent measurements) for
various topics such as the built environment,
community involvement, education, natural resource
management, equity, hazard vulnerability, housing,
local economy, public health, resilience planning,
society and transportation. These indicators are
derived from a broad collection of socio-economic,
health and ecological data collected from publicly
available sources. Continuing discussions with
community participants will help Agency researchers
identify key topic areas, and incorporate the
indicators into applications and tools that are useful
and accessible for smaller communities. The topic
areas will be used as the basis for populating a
community characteristics dashboard, a user-friendly
graphic interface display that presents information in
an accessible, easily understood format.
1
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA/601/F-18/001 August 2018

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DISC Prototype
DISC is an application of existing indicators that
offers relevant, local and readily-available
information to help smaller communities advance
their sustainability goals. The figure to the right
illustrates how the tool may represent an overall
community sustainability score, and its component
scores for community characteristics relating to the
topic areas of interest. Upon initial use, communities
will be provided with information on sustainability
attributes such as environment, natural resource
management, transportation, and most importantly,
information on resources they can potentially target
to implement projects to improve the community's
resilience and long-term success. Users can score or
>EPA
SERA
Decision Integration for Strong Communities
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Click on circle to reveals the indicators related to a topic. Use the sliders left or right to
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Decision Integration for Strong Communities
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weight the indicators to reflect their community's
constraints and priorities (figure to the left), creating
a highly customized snapshot of local conditions and
sustainability factors. They can also save their
snapshot as a downloadable, easy-to-share pdf file.
The DISC application may also be used to track and
monitor the benefits and impacts of local
sustainability projects. The application is being
designed to be flexible and readily upgradeable,
making it applicable for exploring current conditions
with the confidence that it will be available to future
assessments, and comparing and contrasting growth
and change in the future.
CONTACTS
For more information, or to partner with EPA in the development of DISC, please contact:
•	David Olszyk, Ph.D., EPA Office of Research & Development, 541-754-4397, olsz\ k.da\ id epa.gov
•	Viccy Salazar, EPA Region 10, 206-553-1060, salazar.viccy@epa.gov
•	Bruce Duncan, Ph.D., EPA Region 10, 206-553-0218, duncan.bruce0epa.gov
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA/601/F-18/001 August 2018

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