Sustainability indicators - what are they?

            In its five-year 1996 – 2000 program, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
(UNCSD)  offered  a  system  of  indicators  of  sustainability .  They  are  132  and  are  divided  into  four  categories:  social  –  39;  economic  – 23; environmental – 55 and instituonal – 15.
The proposed 132 indicators for the analysis of  sustainability  are  not  obligatory.  The  European Commission on Statistics has adopted 47 of them for the European Union for the reason that there is no reliable information for the rest of them. Complying with the requirements of Agenda 21 we could recognize  4  groups:  efficiency,  resource  utilization, financing of sustainable development and adoption of technologies and innovations.

Compilation and publication of indicators

It is hardly possible to give a reasonable overview of the large variety of national and international programs of compiling and publishing social, environmental and sustainable development indicators. In general these programs include some or all of the following topics:

Table 1. Environmental indicators of the European Union.

• population (growth, migration, refugees)
• human needs (health, food, housing, education, equity, security, etc.)
• renewable and non-renewable natural resources
• environmental quality (air, water, land)
• ecosystems (acidification, eutrophication, biodiversity)
• economic sectors (and their impacts, including emissions, natural resource use, production and consumption patterns, technologies)
• natural and man-made disasters
• global environmental problems (climate change, ozone layer depletion)
• globalization
• institutions.

 

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) maintains an online directory of “sustainable development indicators initiatives”; in March 2004, the directory included about 600 initiatives at national and international levels by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals.

       The problem of more or less lengthy indicator lists is comparability and aggregation. Integrative concepts of sustainable development or the state and trend of the environment require evaluation or combination of indicators capturing the ‘gist’ of these concepts. One method of evaluating indicator sets is summarizing the impression of their results in icons such as smiling faces  or traffic lights of red alert, yellow wait and see, and green o.k. Of course such evaluation is judgmental, and even more so when attempting an overall judgment:

    Among different aggregation methods, green accounting in a common physical or monetary unit and averaging indicators are most commonly applied. Green accounting of material flows and environmental cost is described elsewhere. Here the focus is on popular ad-hoc calculations of compound indices and their use and usefulness. 

Why do we need indicators?

 There are three basic functions of indicators - simplification, quantification, and communication. Indicators generally simplify in order to make complex phenomena quantifiable so that information can be communicated. Some of the general public are concerned about sustainable development and the environment. They like to be informed about the state of the environment and the economy and how and why they are changing.


Organizations involved with sustainability indicators

Commission for Sustainable Development http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/
Dow Jones Sustainability Indices http://www.sustainability-index.com/
Food and Agriculture Organisation http://www.fao.org/
Food Standards Agency http://www.foodstandards.gov.uk/
FTSE 4 GOOD http://www.ftse4good.com/Indices/index.jsp
International Institute for Environment and Development http://www.iied.org/
International Institute for Sustainable Development http://www.iisd.org/default.asp
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development http://www.oecd.org/
World Bank http://www.worldbank.org/

Sourses:

1.International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology
Volume 2, Issue 2, 1995 

2.Sustainability  Indicators. Report of the Project on Indicators of Sustainable Development, SCOPE 58, Edited by B. Moldan  and S. Billharz, 1997, Willay and Sons, Great Britain, 1977.