Sustainability

4Measurement of Sustainability

Rajneesh Singh¹, Akash Kumar Gupta¹, Puspendu Bhunia¹, Rao Y. Surampalli², Tian C. Zhang², Pengzhi Lin³, and Yu Chen³

¹School of Infrastructure, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

²Civil & Environmental Engineering Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Omaha, NE, USA

³State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

4.1 Introduction

Humans, being one of the dominant species on this planet, are continually influencing the fate of its ecosystem. Humans can engineer the ecosystem in several ways, e.g. extracting minerals, participating in the extinction of species, creation of new species by genetic interference, polluting and overburdening the world, etc. Furthermore, with the increase in population, the interference of humans has gone beyond the extraction of minerals and favoring beneficial species. Humans have now begun controlling the whole ecosystem in every possible manner, which further factors into the transformation of the entire biosphere, even at the fundamental level (Bell and Morse 2003; Kareiva et al. 2007; Kidd 1992). The population of humans, measured at around 1 billion in the late eighteenth century, had reached a mammoth 7.6 billion in 2017 and is slated to reach 11.184 billion in 2100 (Gupta 2018). The population explosion in the past 100 years has surpassed the total increase during the past 10 000 years by about seven times. It is astonishing ...