Sustainable development indicators assessment for the city of Anchieta-ES Brazil at different times of the local economy

ABSTRACT

Sustainable development indicators (SDIs) are important parameters used to quantify sustainability and to help understand the transformations that occur in a city. The city of Anchieta is located in southeastern Brazil, and until the end of 2015 was characterized mainly by industrial production, a situation that changed after 2015 due to the standstill of a metallurgical/steel plant installed in the municipality. This study shows significant changes in the indexes associated with the SDIs of the economic, social, political-institutional and environmental dimensions for the city of Anchieta since 2015, coinciding with the economic impact caused by the standstill of the local industry. The results show the strong dependence of the city on taxes and the source of income generated by the local industrial activity. Prior to the plant standstill at the end of 2015, SDIs that positively changed the sustainability indexes of the municipality were associated with the economic, social and political-institutional dimensions, while the environmental dimension did not perform well, a behavior reversed after 2015. In general, the SDIs for the municipality showed acceptable indexes in 2014 and 2015 but regressed to alert indexes after 2015. Thus, it is observed an imbalance in the indexes of the SDI’s for the dimensions analyzed, which suggests the importance of a restructuring of local public policies, aiming the balance between all dimensions, not just ensuring high performance on some dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• comparative analysis
• SDI’s imbalance
• SDI’s changes
• local economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.