This resource, the VirtualNC database and information website, was developed for North Carolina residents, business owners, officials, and the general public in hopes of simplifying the process of understanding how choices can be made concerning sustainability efforts. Data for environmental and human health indicators for the state of North Carolina, mostly at the county level, were collected in order to build a usable database. Forthcoming information includes more indicators for economic vitality and social justice. Information is presented introducing an Analytic Hierarchy Decision Process, which quantifies and weighs these many indicators in order to help decision-makers organize their priorities. While specific suggestions for which process to use and how to stress importance is left up to the decision-maker, it is hoped that the need for such a process can be made apparent and easy to use in this format. The project is by no means finished and will be updated and expanded in the future.
        The website was prepared by undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Under the direction of Carolina Environmental Program Director Douglas Crawford-Brown and graduate students Preethi Sama and Heekyu Sohn, as well as assistance from research associate Kathleen House, seniors in Environmental Science, Environmental Studies, and Public Health fulfilled their “capstone” requirement – Analysis and Solution of Environmental Problems. Others who provided suggestions or information include Aaron Nelson of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce and Pam Wall of Triangle Tomorrow.
“Triangle Tomorrow, formerly called the Greater Triangle Regional Council, is the recognized leader for building strategic partnerships on quality-of-life issues that affect the Research Triangle Region. The organization formed after the 1992 World Class Region Conference when its 700-plus participants identified the need for a leadership organization focused on regional long-term issues.”  
       Though it is a project developed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the VirtualNC resource was developed with the ideals of Triangle Tomorrow in mind. This non-profit organization highlights the efforts of local leaders to bring together stakeholders from universities, businesses, and chambers of commerce from throughout the triangle region in hopes of supporting the same idea as the VirtualNC project: for sustainability to be attainable, many players must work together, and include all aspects of life, to ensure a prosperous future for residents. Current projects include air quality and public transportation task forces. Suggestions for benchmarks on environmental, economic, and community indicators were brought forth to the project group by Executive Director Pam Wall.

       From this page you should now go to the defining sustainability page. This page will give you a more in depth definition of what sustainability is (linked in the button below) and will outline for you the many steps of the AHD process. From the Defining Sustainability Page, you are to go to an attribute page. For this project, we defined four attributes; Human Health, Environmental Health, Economic Vitality, and Social Justice. We then took two of these attributes (Human Health and Environmental Health) and researched them further to find their sub-attributes and in some cases, sub-sub-attributes. This will be explained in more detail as you move through this process.