Monitoring sustainability in insular areas

The notion of sustainability is used widely at the policy level, but only few approaches deal with its measurement, especially at the local level. Here, we develop and apply a practical tool for the estimation of the sustainability state at the island level with the use of indicators selected and adapted from international agencies and institutes, in a framework which is an expanded version of the DPSR approach. The identification of the significant sustainability state factors and the selection of the indicators are based on areas' characteristics, namely their insularity and the fact that they are in the Mediterranean. The values of these indicators were obtained or calculated for the islands of Paros and Kos in Greece. The findings reveal that the method can be of great use for the sustainability evaluation and for planning the sustainable development of islands.