Abstract

Sustainable development is often defined as such "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Assessing the sustainability of human activities is a difficult task, since the ability of future generations depend on many different factors, like resources, environment, economic, and social relations, as well as their interaction. A failure in one area would probably bring a failure in another and derailing humanity from its goal of achieving sustainable development. The task for science is to bring technological development that would enable sustainability of the use of necessary resources, of protecting environment, as well as enabling balanced economic and social progress. A difficult part of that task is to gauge this technological development on global, regional, national, and local scale, by measuring and monitoring sustainability of various human activities.