Environment and quality of life

This chapter argues that a purely ecological perspective on sustainability is too limited and that a human perspective should also be considered. It approaches sustainability as well-balanced relationships between humans and their environments. The chapter introduces a measure of quality of life (QoL) as a way to assess social sustainability on the individual level. To assess environmentally determined QoL, objective and subjective measures can be used. Unidimensional measures of QoL describe the relationship between one environmental factor and one QoL aspect. To study multiple relationships between environmental factors and QoL, multidimensional measures of QoL are needed. Various empirical studies have examined relationships between environmental characteristics and individual QoL. The chapter discusses how individual QoL measures have been applied in studies on human-environment relationships. Many of these studies have used a multidimensional instrument for assessing individual QoL.