Recent decades have seen rapid growth in the implementation of sustainability reporting, which
seeks to evaluate the extent to which an industry, private or public organisation or agency is 
sustainable. While significant progress has been made in measuring environmental and economic 
dimensions of sustainability, there is relatively little consensus about what aspects of social 
sustainability should be monitored and reported, or what it means to be socially sustainable. 
Increasingly, achieving wellbeing is recognised as the goal of social sustainability. In recent years this 
has led to some emerging consensus about key indicators of social wellbeing that are important to 
monitor, as well as identification of other areas that are important to consider monitoring.
The Australian cotton industry released its first sustainability report in 2014, which included some 
initial social sustainability indicators. In 2019, the University of Canberra was commissioned to 
examine a wider range of social wellbeing indicators, and recommend indicators that could be 
included in future sustainability reporting. This report presents the recommended social and 
wellbeing indicators, and explains how they were developed and tested during this project. 
A total of 22 social and wellbeing indicators are recommended for monitoring in this report, several
of which are identified as ideally requiring regular monitoring, while others may be monitored less 
regularly. These recommendations were developed through (i) reviewing existing literature and 
availability of data on social wellbeing, (ii) examining the experiences of those working in the cotton 
industry and those living in cotton communities through in depth interviews, (iii) proposing a set of 
social and wellbeing indicators to include in Australia’s cotton industry sustainability framework, (iv) 
testing the initial indicators through collecting new data and analysing existing data, and (v) 
discussing findings with cotton industry representatives and stakeholders in workshops and 
identifying which indicators would be prioritised based on these discussions.