The Sustainable Society Index (SSI) shows the level of sustainability of 213 assessed countries. It shows in a simple way the distance to full sustainability for each of the 21 indicators that build up the SSI.[1] The SSI is used for monitoring the progress of a country on its way to sustainability, for setting policy priorities with respect to sustainability, to make comparisons between countries when assessing corporate risks, for education purposes, and for further research and development.
The SSI was developed by the Dutch Sustainable Society Foundation to provide the public at large, as well as politicians and authorities, with a transparent and easy tool to measure how sustainable a society is. The SSI is based on the Brundtland definition, and incorporates 21 indicators. These can be sorted into seven categories and three wellbeing dimensions. In 2020, production and development of SSI was taken over by Technische Hochschule Köln.
SSI data are published on a bi-annual basis. All data show the same cut-off date, usually two years prior to the edition's publication date. The latest edition (2018) contains sustainability data of the year 2016.
The Sustainable Society Index is one of the very few indices which includes all three wellbeing dimensions: Human, Environmental and Economic Wellbeing. As such they reflect the triple bottom line approach of sustainability.
The latest edition of the SSI covers data from 2000 to 2020. Time series analyses are possible over the period of 2000 to 2018. The 2019 and 2020 data are available as far as deliverers already have provided them.
The 2018 edition of the SSI demonstrated that the world is behind on sustainability in every of the three dimensions. In particular, the following results were found:
