Scorecard an attempt to measure well-being

By Eric Pryne
Seattle Times staff reporter

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We've devised yardsticks that measure and rank the performance of just about everything from the economy to college basketball teams.

Now the Seattle think tank Northwest Environment Watch has unveiled a complex, ambitious new tool for charting the Northwest's well-being. Its authors say the Cascadia Scorecard is the first attempt to meld measures of what's really important — economic security, healthy people, a healthy environment — into a single, comprehensive regional index.

Here's the surprise: On the whole, the report concludes that things are getting better here.

In 1990, the Northwest — Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia — was, on average, 40 years of steady progress away from reaching the goals the scorecard sets. In 2002 those goals were just 32 years distant.

For more information The Web site for Northwest Environment Watch is www.northwestwatch.org.

The report says the region has made progress toward four of six goals: improving life expectancy, containing sprawl, protecting and managing forests, and slowing birth rates. But the economic security of the typical resident is more tenuous, it adds, and the region is no closer to achieving the energy-efficiency goal.

Alan Durning, Northwest Environment Watch executive director, said the scorecard will be updated annually. He also plans to add a seventh indicator, for pollution.

The authors write that the scorecard "reflects progress toward the Northwest's shared aspirations of healthy, prosperous people and thriving, unpolluted ecosystems." But some of its components are sure to be controversial.

The sprawl indicator, for instance, assumes more people living in higher-density neighborhoods is a good thing. The forest-stewardship indicator establishes the historically low logging levels of the late 1990s as the standard.

"There are values implicit in the indicators we've chosen," Durning acknowledges. "The point is, there also are values implicit in the indicators we hear about constantly."

The closely watched gross domestic product, for instance.

"It's usually interpreted as a benchmark for how the economy is doing, but in fact it's a summation of dollars changing hands," Durning said. "The value it expresses is that more money is better, regardless."

Northwest Environment Watch, whose mission is to establish "an environmentally sound economy and way of life" in the region, spent more than two years putting together the Cascadia Scorecard.

"If you look at the process they've followed, it's been very robust," said Steve Nicholas, director of the city of Seattle's Office of Sustainability and the Environment.

"Potentially, there's tremendous usefulness in this. It does recognize that all of these things are connected to each other."

For each of the six components of the index, Northwest Environment Watch selected or constructed measures that it determined best reflected what people want. To measure prosperity, for instance, the think tank devised a regional "economic security index" that includes poverty and unemployment rates and median household income.

Then the authors established "best in the world" goals. For population, for example, it's the low fertility rate of Sweden and the Netherlands in 2001 and 2002; for sprawl, the large percentage of Vancouver, B.C.-area residents who lived in higher-density neighborhoods in 2002.

The think tank determined, based on recent trends, how long it would take the region as a whole to reach each of those goals. Those numbers were averaged to create the composite index.

According to the scorecard, British Columbia is closer to the goals than the three Northwest states for almost every indicator, and for the overall index. The province's more-compact urban-development pattern and its wider social safety net probably are important factors, Durning said.

Bruce Agnew of the Discovery Institute — a more conservative Seattle think tank — said such comparisons within the region are the most valuable part of the scorecard.

While Agnew said he questions some of the report's methodology, "it does give us an independent look at how the region is changing. ... Trying to look at all this in a more holistic, long-term way is important."

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com

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