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IPAT-S is a general-purpose scenario scripting language, but it was initially designed with sustainable development issues in mind. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has developed a tool for visualizing sustainability indicators - the Dashboard of Sustainability. IPAT Studio, the graphical user interface to IPAT-S, supports the IISD Dashboard.
“Sustainable Development” is an elusive concept. Beside raising persistent questions over what is to be sustained, for whom, and for how long, it also raises the question of what “development” might mean. Constructing sustainability indicators is an important exercise, not only to measure progress toward goals that have been identified, but also to clarify what those goals are.
Unfortunately, once a set of indicators is identified, it is often difficult to interpret because of the broad scope of sustainability issues. Moreover, different stakeholders might assign different weights to the various indicators when deciding whether the region under study is on a sustainable path or not. The IISD Dashboard assists in the interpretation of indicators by offering a variety of views into an indicator set and allowing each user to assign his or her own weights to an indicator set.
The IISD Dashboard can be launched from within IPAT Studio if the freely-available Dashboard is already installed on the user’s computer. If the output from the IPAT-S script fits the Dashboard format, then selecting “Launch Dashboard” from the IPAT Studio menu starts the Dashboard program.
Note: The indicators displayed below are for demonstration purposes only. They are not meant to be taken seriously as part of a scenario or indicator set.
