Central Ohio Regional Sustainability Dashboard helps Columbus monitor regional goals

The Central Ohio Regional Sustainability Dashboard is a prime example of how Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) and Ohio State's Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) collaborate to improve the greater Columbus region.  The dashboard helps the region to monitor the objectives of the Regional Sustainability Agenda. 

In 2017, MORPC convened representatives from member communities to create a Regional Sustainability Agenda, which shared quantitative measures for sustainability objectives in a 2018 Tableau-based Regional Sustainability Report card.  In 2019, MORPC asked CURA to help develop a Regional Sustainability Dashboard that would provide additional features and streamline the analysis and production.

MORPC staff took the lead on refining the methods used to compute the measures and identifying suitable input data. CURA developed the infrastructure for automatically retrieving, transforming, and archiving the data, and developed a custom web-based dashboard to visualize the output data. A working group of data and sustainability experts from the City of Columbus, Ohio EPA, OneColumbus, and many others provided oversight and feedback on how the Dashboard culd betst serve different constitutencies. 

Although the data depicted on the dashboard is aggregated at the county or region level, much of the input data is more granular, and the input data, the output data, and code are documented and available to the public. They are currently planning a set of improvements that will incorporate changes to the Regional Sustainability Agenda and will make the data even more findable and accessible.