Sustainable Tourism Law

748 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW a basis for policy as the Stiglitz report proposed by defending that sustainability assessment requires “a dashboard of indicators”. According to Stiglitz (2009), any assessment of sustainability must be complementary to the question of current well-being or economic performance and must be examined separately. If this doesn´t happen, potentially confusing messages may arise when one tries to combine current well-being and sustainability into a single indicator. So, sustainability requires a “simultaneous preservation or increase in several ‘stocks’: quantities and qualities of natural resources and of human, social and physical capital” (Stiglitz et al., 2009, p. 17). Under this approach the best way to achieve both interdependence and trade- -offs between indicators and get reliable reflections of the indicators is to try to display a multi-dimensional information. As a result of the recent world financial crisis, there was a renewed attention in furthering the importance of a plurality of perspectives for shaping policy discussions and as preconized since early times, different approaches to sustainability indicators need to be connected, rather than competing or conflicting. In other words, the main goal is not to construct dividing lines between economic, ecological or sociological indicators, but to emphasize the need for a more comprehensive set of indicators that reflect the plurality of normative value assumptions expressed in narratives (Garnåsjordet, 2012). II. 1. Uncertainty and Sustainability Once natural systems may be uncertain, complex and unpredictable, we may focus twomain non-reducible sources: (i) their nature entails that any quantitative representation based on a given set of measurable attributes sooner or later will become obsolete because of systems-evolutionary changes introducing new definitions of relevant attributes and; (ii) their organization of multiple hierarchical levels requires the adoption of different scales for their perception and representation and makes it impossible to adopt just a single mathematical model, no matter how complicated. So, the huge confusion and ambiguity that generates uncertainty, means that a forward-looking indicators are required, reflecting the idea that precaution must be implicit in the notion of sustainable development (Garnåsjordet, 2012). The Stiglitz commission recognized that uncertainty is normative, as they question how measures established today may be used to predict the valuations