“stakeholders”, namely society, environment and economy. In addition sustainability implies
that these three stakeholders are taken into consideration not only for the present generation
but also for all future generations. Presently the direction of thinking is to formulate indicators
of sustainability in regard to the environment by means of a large list of different observable
environmental qualities, e.g. availability of drinking water, availability of non-recyclable
resources etc. Indicators of sustainability are formulated e.g. in MONET (Altwegg et al.
(2003)); in European Communities (2001) a comprehensive listing of indicators of the
condition of the environment is also provided. In Lomborg (2001) a rather rigorous statistical
investigation of a large number of indicators related to the present state of the earth is
described. Many of these indicators are coinciding with indicators suggested elsewhere. The
results of the mentioned works form a good basis for directing the focus for decision making
to the areas which really matters or where problems have already emerged. However, in order
to identify societal strategies and policies enhancing sustainability it still remains to develop a
firm theoretical basis for this; consistently assessing and weighing benefits and costs for
society, economy and environment for the present and future generations.
Consequences to economy and society
Direct economical losses are generally straightforwardly assessed and will not be further
discussed in the present context. Indirect economical losses e.g. due to structural failures and
other adverse events require more care and should include effects on the general economy due
to business losses.
For what concerns the simultaneous consideration of society and economy, a consistent
framework for their joint consideration in a decision framework for socio-economical
sustainable decision making seems to be available through the LQI as outlined in the
foregoing sections.
Consequences to the environment
For the stakeholder environment adverse consequences from engineering decisions may be
divided into different categories depending on the characteristics of the consequence.
Considering consequences which can be related to increased mortality and morbidity for
humans Lentz and Rackwitz (2004) and Lentz and Rackwitz (2006) investigate approaches to
assess the feasibility of risk reduction. The idea followed is to modify the LQI approach
accounting for the possibly delayed effect of morbidity on mortality.
Considering damages to environmental qualities with no known relation to morbidity and
mortality for humans an approach denoted the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) is
suggested in Ditlevsen and Friis-Hansen (2003). The principle suggested there is to assess the
willingness to pay for avoiding such damages in terms of the character and duration of the
damages.
In regard to damages to the eco-system which may occur as a consequence of extinction of
species there is still no basis for relating these to either societal or monetary scales. So far
most of the reported work has been directed to identify species which are assumed critical for
the eco-system of humans, see e.g. (Lomborg (2001)). The exploitation of non-recyclable