Signatures of sustainability: A framework for interpreting relationships among environmental, social, and economic conditions for United States metropolitan areas

The concept of sustainable development focuses on meeting the needs of societies, while simultaneously maintaining environmental conditions that support these societies. Sustainable development is underpinned by the notion that human development is circumscribed by environmental limitations, and that society can affect the environment in ways that may limit society's current or future development capacities and options. However, besides isolated environmental catastrophes wrought by people, the ability to make connections between the effects of human impacts on the environment and changes in human welfare is not well developed. Sustainable development theory itself is thin and little tested. Complex interactions in human-environment systems likely complicate searches for causality that could further sustainable development theory. Yet an immediate need exists to understand better relationships among desired conditions, so that potential tradeoffs that may exist between societal development and environmental protection can begin to be identified and causal links further studied. This investigation explores relationships among environmental, social, and economic conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas, focusing on conditions drawn from the core of the current sustainability literature. Surprisingly, no broad associations between environmental degradation and social or economic conditions were evident. Studied social and economic conditions were highly intercorrelated. Environmental conditions, however, were found to be consistently and significantly worse in metropolitan areas with larger populations. Striking geographic patterns also emerged. Metropolitan areas with the best overall sustainability conditions were almost exclusively in the north, whereas the worst performing ones were almost entirely in the south. Causal reasons for this geography are likely complex. However, statistical associations revealed that American metropolitan areas that have most closely achieved conditions that analysts identify as important environmentally, socially, and economically are metropolitan areas that are principally small in population, middle to upper-middle class, and white. Correlations suggest that inequalities in the living conditions of blacks and Hispanics versus non-Hispanic whites may potentially be a larger obstacle to achieving desired levels of human development in U.S. metropolitan areas than is environmental degradation currently. These findings suggest shifting priorities to include social inequalities, and not only environmental degradation, to advance sustainable development goals in American metropolitan areas today.