Methods

11 social indicators (life satisfaction, healthy life expectancy, nutrition, sanitation, income, access to energy, education, social support, democratic quality, equality, and employment) and seven biophysical indicators (CO2 emissions, phosphorus, nitrogen, blue water, embodied human appropriation of net primary production (eHANPP), ecological footprint, and
material footprint) have been selected from the indicators used to construct the safe and just space framework proposed by Raworth. The thresholds and scaling for each indicator came from the work of O'Neill and collaborators.

The social indicators have been used to produce a distance to social achievement and the biophysical indicators to construct a score of biophysical overshoot. These two scores have then been combine to propose a social-environmental index for each country.

 (a) Projection of countries using the number of social and biophysical reached thresholds in 2011. B corresponds to the optimum and W to the pessimum. The valley of trade-off corresponds to the location of most countries (95%) with either high social standards and many biophysical boundaries overshot or few social achievements and few overshot boundaries. (b) 3D space with a qualitative dimension x based on biophysical thresholds and two quantitative dimensions, y the quantitative distance to social success and k based on the intensity of biophysical transgression. From x and k, a z axis summarizing biophysical overshoot is obtained by reprojecting c' on (BW'). c is then reprojected (c'') on the grey plane (BWW') where B corresponds to the optimum, W to the pessimum, and W' to the projection of W on z. Socio-environmental index (SEI) is calculated using the distance [Bc''] standardized by [BW].

The detailed methods are explained in this publication:

RIGAL, Stanislas. Social-environmental index: combining social and biophysical indicators reveals limits to growth. Ecology and Society, 2022, vol. 27, no 2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-13238-270233