U.S. Regional Programs

Bay Area
Cape Cod
Central Texas
Greater Washington DC
Northwest
Rocky Mountain states
Southern California
Southwestern Pennsylvania
Thomas Jefferson Planning District Virginia
U.S.-Mexico Border

Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities

The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities produced a regional report on the state of the Bay Area titled Pathways to Results: Measuring Progress Toward Sustainability (PDF) in January 2003. Indicators included address transportation, housing, economy, natural assets and resources, education and civic engagement, among other topics. In February 2004, Redefining Progress performed a Genuine Progress Indicator study for the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

The Cape Cod Center for Sustainability helped coordinate the production of the 2003 Cape Cod Sustainability Indicators Report. This is the second indicators report published for the area; the first was done in 1999.

Central Texas Sustainability Indicators Project

An indicators project facilitated by a diverse group of residents who are committed to the sustainability of the Austin, Texas, region (defined here as Bastop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis, and Williamson Counties). The organization publishes an annual report on community, economic, environmental and land use indicators.

Greater Washington Research Program

This program of the Brookings Institution seeks to improve public understanding of the Washington metropolitan area, examine the nature of concerns and experiences shared by residents and jurisdictions in the region, and promote innovative policy ideas and collaborations that contribute to the long-term vitality of the Greater Washington area.

The 2001 Potomac Index, co-sponsored by the Potomac Conference, measures the region's progress on key social, economic, and environmental issues. The Index is organized around five priorities identified as critical to the region's success by participants in the Potomac Conference, a forum of area business, government and nonprofit leaders. These five priorities are: innovation, inclusion, education, quality of life, and regional thinking.

Northwest

Since 1993, the nonprofit organization Northwest Environment Watch has reported on the state of the Northwest. This Place on Earth 2002: Measuring What Matters presented a first effort at an alternative yardstick for the Northwest, by measuring how the region is doing in critical areas such as salmon health, sprawl, income inequality, and land use. NEW released its Cascadia Scorecard in 2004, a regional index that looks at how changes in health, economy, population, energy, sprawl, forests, and pollution affect Cascadia, the region encompassing British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and western Montana.

Rocky Mountain States

The first State of the Rockies Conference at Colorado College released the 2004 State of the Rockies Report Card, a 63-page, comprehensive and accessible statement on what is happening in the eight Rocky Mountain states: Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, as this spectacular and fragile region is buffeted by major changes, among them the stresses of huge population growth; ranch lands being sliced up into subdivisions; income levels becoming widely disparate; and employment levels shifting.

Southern California

The UCLA Institute of the Environment has issued the Southern California Environmental Report Card each year since 1998. Although the report card does not consider the same indicators each year, it has offered status reports and grades on a number of measures, including sustainable building (2002), smart growth (2003) and traffic (2004).

Southwestern Pennsylvania 

A Regional Sustainability Indicators Report for Southwestern Pennsylvania was produced by Sustainable Pittsburgh in 2002. The report represents a first effort to gauge overall sustainability in a six-county region. The complete report is online in an interactive website format. The project used indicators in the "compass" areas of Nature, Economy, Society, and Wellbeing.

Thomas Jefferson District Planning Commission, Virginia 

In 1994, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission formed a Sustainability Council to serve the Virginia counties of Albemarle, Greene, Louisa, Nelson, and the City of Charlottesville. The council’s three year mission was to develop an agreement among the region’s citizens, businesses, organizations, and governments to build a sustainable future in which the vitality of the economy and environment are preserved. 

The Sustainability Council developed 159 indicators in the following categories to continuously monitor the sustainability of the region’s economic, environmental, social, and political systems:
 

Human Resources Produced Resources  Land Development  Values/Ethics  Government  Agriculture/Forestry

Human Population Economic Development Waste Social Resources Community Awareness Natural Resources

Human Basic Needs  Transportation  Interdependence/Balance Natural Environment

The 1998 Sustainability Accords were distilled from a larger set of objectives and indicators. They can be viewed on the Thomas Jefferson Sustainability Council Web site or contact:

U.S.-Mexico Border Environmental Indicators

Published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and Mexico's Secretariat for Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries, this 1997 report contains measures and proposed measures of environmental and human health quality in the border area. Environmental indicators were prepared in response to concerns raised by border communities and binational government workgroups in the United States and Mexico about the need for information to use in evaluating the effectiveness of border environmental policies implemented by U.S. and Mexican federal agencies.

Last updated: February 7, 2005

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