Effects
Increased surface runoff
Streambank erosion
Watercourse sedimentation
Estuarine sedimentation
Stream water pollution
Loss of freshwater habitat
Loss of riparian habitat
Loss of amenity
Community dislocation
Birdlife habitat degradation
More cases of asthma
Noise affects local work environment
Energy waste
Residential area disruption
Small business disruption
Confusion on direction of regional development
Cultural disadvantage
Easier heavy traffic access
Reduced traffic congestion
Continued preference for using private vehices
Reduced local civic involvement
Unsafe areas created
Local stores lost
Lost environmental learning opportunities
Emergency services reliability increased
Less dependence on local business,  services, and employment opportunities.
Facilitated region-wide services and movement
.... and so on

Multiple objectives and KiwiGrow™

KiwiGrow™ provides a framework for strategic multi-objective decision-making. The effects of any major management or development alternative for the ecosystem under consideration, whether it is an organisation or a forest, or something else, can be presented in terms of the 28 NZ2100 performance areas.

Even if you have arrived at your management or development alternatives after an assessment and situation analysis, and visioning process that have used KiwiGrow™, it is most likely that the alternatives will be directed at achieving specific goals and objectives that do not explicitly involve the NZ2100 vocabulary. They are much more likely to be expressed in the language appropriate for your particular context. However, if they are truly strategic alternatives, they will have a whole range of potential effects and outcomes, in addition to the particular objectives that motivated them. When you list all of these effects and outcomes, the list rapidly becomes very long and unmanageable.  You may even have missed some out. How should your executive group take all these factors systematically into account when it makes its decision. KiwiGrow™ provides a framework for collapsing all these likely effects and outcomes down into one easily managed and visualised evaluation framework.

Say you are a transport planner. You have some particular transport objectives to achieve, but you have identified a whole range of complementary objectives and effects of the alternatives. From a purely transport perspective, you may even have almost decided which alternative is most preferable, but you are concerned about all these other complicating factors. This is where you must shift your perspective to one of sustainable development, rather than, say, efficient transportation, if you are to avoid unduly minimising what for you may not appear to be the main objectives. The advantage of doing this, is that you and your city strategic managers can look at the whole strategic planning portfolio in an integrated way, and determine where options are conflicting, mutually supportive, or whether some of the potentially beneficial side effects, say, are better delivered in some other way, possibly in a totally different management area, such as climate change impacts. The other advantage is that the NZ2100 framework reflects fundamental values and priorities that decision makers such as politicians can easily understand. At the end of the day, those NZ2100 values are what they are there to deliver. Roads, drains, parks, museums, and so on, are just means to an end. And in the case of roads and drains, for example, their very mundaneness is one reason why communities don't care about them much unless there is a crisis or real issue of some sort. So, the NZ2100 framework provides a means of continually rephrasing decisions in terms that are always relevant, and "close to home".  Consequently, the NZ2100 framework can help policymakers deliver policy with appropriate levels of public comment, in areas that might otherwise be euphemistically termed "low salience issues" - issues that are important and strategic but just have a low public profile. 

OK, you're not a transport planner, you're the manager of a medium sized business. Things have got sufficiently complex in your organisation for there to be a large nunber of potential ways forward. Think about using the NZ2100 framework qualitatively. For each option you have, colour up an empty NZ2100 matrix - e.g. red for a net major negative impact on the performance area, green for a net major positive impact, and yellow, orange and lighter shades of green for intermediate levels of impact. Alternatively, and even simpler, place ticks or crosses in the cells of the matrix, instead of colours. Now lay the tables for all the alternatives out beside each other and see how they compare. If you want to look at combinations of alternatives you will probably need to get more sophisticated and quantitative. But you will have made a start in your use of "new thinking for sustainable development".

Scoring options and weighting performance areas

Simple scoring is one of the easiest quantitative ways you can use the NZ2100 framework to evaluate and compare alternatives. It is not without its limitations, but is useful as a first step in exploring quantitative evaluation. One procedure is as follows:

1. Choose a set of social, economic, environmental, and cultural indicators that will underpin quantitative assessment of the 28 KiwiGrow™ performance areas.
2. Develop mathematical transformations, or use simple classification rules, to normalise the working ranges of these indicators into graduated ranges from -100 to 100, with zero associated with no increase in risk, and 100 associated with maximum risk increment, and -100 with maximum reduction in risk.
3. Using results of modelling or empirical research where they are available, and direct assessment otherwise, rate each of the indicators on the normalised scale, for each of the management or development alternatives.
4. Create mathematical rules to combine the normalised values for subsets of these indicators to produce a single composite measure of impact or performance, for each of the 28 areas.
5. Apply these mathematical rules to calculate the value of the composite measure of impact or performance, for each of the 28 KiwiGrow™ performance areas, and for each of the management alternatives.
6. Use an appropriate graphical display method to compare the total ecosystem impact of the management alternatives, across all 29 performance areas.

Optionally, you can provide facilities for decision-makers to weight the 28 performance areas (distributing weights over the seven performance areas, separately for each of the four major dimensions), and calculate overall scores for social, economic, environmental, and cultural impact, for each management alternative. This final step should be made only if decision-makers cannot identify a preferred alternative by comparision of the KiwiGrow™ matrices. If you really want, you can set the evaluation system up to require the user to specify the relative importance of social, economic, environmental, and cultural health - and then determine the impact of this on the preferred management or development alternative, as conveyed by just a single number for each alternative. There is really no fundamental justification for preferentially weighting any one KiwiGrow™ performance area over another - they are all critical for sustainable development. However, tradeoffs are inevitable, and users may come to increase their own self-understanding by going through this weighting procedure and seeing how it affects the end result. Even if decisions are made by direct comparison of the KiwiGrow™ score matrices for the different alternatives, tradeoff judgements are made implicitly by expressing preference for one set of tradeoffs over another.

Multimedia decision packages

Creative Decisions advocates embedding decision support tools within multimedia information systems that help to reduce the problem of decisions being made, or at least preferences being established, without some minimum exposure to background information that both legitimises the decision support framework, and prepares the user to use the tool. Multimedia decision tools can be used on projection systems with groups, taking votes to determine priorities to attach to KiwiGrow™ performance areas, displaying NZ2100 matrices for the management alternatives, and, if desired, collectively defining the precise meaning of each of the 28 performance measures in terms of the set of (say, 100) underlying indicators.  With future development of NZ2100 as an acknowledged decision support framework for sustainable development, we would expect various open source software tools to be developed collaboratively for use by the KiwiGrow™ network.