Sustainability and sustainable development have become topics of great interest across the global community. The Index of Sustainable Functionality developed at the Centre for Water Research is based on the premise that the current economic measures of progress do not adequately reflect changes in our quality of life, nor the changes of the health of the ecosystem in which we live. The ISF provides a simple, objective and quantitative assessment of the sustainability of certain actions. It combines quantitative trends, as measured by indicators, with the changing values of society, as measured by relative weightings.
As part of a Real Time Management (RTM) system for lakes, estuaries and coastal waters, numerical models are used to simulate the response of the system to selected forecasting scenarios, which may be natural events, such as forecasted weather conditions, storms and floods, or may focus on anthropogenic perturbations. The ISF can then be used to determine the sustainability of certain management actions in response to these scenarios.
