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Indicators
of Sustainable Development
Indicators
of sustainable development need to be developed to provide solid bases for decision
making at all levels and to contribute to the self-regulating sustainability
of integrated environment and development systems.
The
Bellagio Principles
Indicators
and Information Systems
The
Pressure State Response Framework
UN
Development Watch
| Extract from:
Chapter 40.4 of Agenda 21,
from the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, 1992
The goal is sustainable
development, the process is the preparation and implementation national
strategies for sustainable development.
But in order to
know whether processes are effective, or need changing, there is a need
to establish indicators of sustainable development. |
Challenges
of Indicator Systems
 
Full Text
It is recognised that indicators
are vital to capture trends in ways that policy makers and others can grasp
immediately.
"...Economic planning
would be unthinkable without GNP figures, unemployment rates, and the like;
so would social planning without such indicators as life expectancy and rates
of fertility, infant mortality and literacy. Yet, environmental policy-making
has no comparable measures today". (Mathews and Tunstall 1991)
New indicators are needed
to guide policy-makers in their assessment of environmental quality and to enable
the integration of environmental, economic and social concerns for sustainable
development planning. Such indicators will be a vital ingredient in the development
and monitoring of national strategies for sustainable development. They will
also be a key tool in sustainable analysis.
Indicators that have been
proposed range from sectoral sustainable development and the sustainable use
of an ecosystem, to more general indicators of sustainable development.
GDP is perhaps the most
used 'hard' measure of development, but it fails to allow for capital maintenance
of natural assets and takes limited account of the contribution of the environment
to economic activity. As a consequence, this measure might actually discourage
the implementation of sustainable development policies, particularly in countries
with an economy which is heavily dependent on the use of natural resources.
In the end it will be necessary
to use a range of indicators, and these can by considered under the following
headings:
-
environmental
indicators - measuring changes in the state of the environment.
These indicators should be simple and practical, easily read and understood
by decision makers, and might best be expressed in non-monetized, physical
terms, placing an emphasis on rates of change (eg, rates of depletion of
fish stocks or forest resources). They should be based on data that is readily
available in common data sources.
-
sustainability
indicators - measuring the distance between that change and a sustainable
state of the environment.
-
sustainable development
indicators - measuring progress towards the broader goal of sustainable
development in the national context.
The development of these
indicators will require careful consideration of a number of methodological
issues related to qualitative variables, such as the performance of institutions.
However, it will be extremely important to avoid focussing on indicators that
are difficult or impossible to measure in developing countries. Simple and practical
indices are required.
Daly and Cobb (1989) have
suggested an index of sustainable economic welfare which includes environmental
components but is much broader. This index might usefully be refined with time,
using the above typology, into an index of sustainable development.
The relative merits of a
range of separate indicators and single indices will need very careful consideration.
But the key guide in framing of operational recommendations for sustainable
development must be simplicity.
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