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INDICATORS
This page provides an introduction to indicators, particularly those
relevant to sustainability, as a place to get started. It is selective
rather than complete, but the links and
references will help you to go further.
INTRODUCTION
INDICATORS OF
ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
VALUE-BASED INDICATORS
LINKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An indicator is a sign that
stands for or represents something, or more specifically a variable
that summarizes or simplifies relevant information, makes a phenomenon
visible or perceptible, or quantifies, measures and communicates
relevant information (Gallopin, in Moldan
et al., 1997).
This is
distinct from data, which are actual measurements or observations.
Indicators may be derived from data, but they have an additional or
wider meaning.
Indicators can take many forms, from different colours, light signals
or graphic symbols through to numbers on a scale. Traffic lights
indicate whether it is safe (or legal) to enter an intersection; a
pilot's instruments indicate an aircraft's speed, orientation,
direction, etc.; GDP indicates the level of economic activity; and a
figure for life expectancy indicates the general health of a country or
community.
Measuring or expressing something with an indicator makes it visible
and creates the possibility of managing or improving it. When
statistics for unemployment were collected and an indicator, the
unemployment rate, was developed, it became a political issue and a
measure of the success or failure of a government. It was natural that
Agenda 21, the action plan for sustainable development adopted at the
Rio Earth Summit in 1992, called for the development of indicators of
sustainable development as one way of encouraging governments to adopt
policies and actions for sustainability.
The most effective indicator processes are those where the users are
directly involved in the design of the indicators and know how they
want to use them. Creating indicators is a good way to conceptualize a
problem or to think through a process. You have to decide what you can
measure that really reflects what is important to manage, and what will
best show that your efforts at management are in fact working. Agreeing
on indicators can also create networks or push people to work together
who otherwise would not have done so. Governments developing indicators
of sustainability have to establish some kind of inter-ministerial
mechanism for collaboration and sharing of data. Indicator design
can thus also be an institution-building process for more integrated
policy making.
Indicators also impose a discipline of measurement, since they require
data that will give some kind of numbers or signals. It is easy to
imagine what would be good to indicate, but much harder to find
real data that reliably show what is happening. Many projects for
sustainability indicators have defined a large set of ideal indicators,
but then found that reliable data were only available for a small
fraction of those. There is also an inevitable tension between experts
who see many indicators necessary to cover the complexities of
sustainability, and policy makers who want one simple number to guide
their decision-making. This usually means having a simple indicator to
draw attention to the issue, with the possibility to burrow down into
the underlying indicators and data when it is necessary to explain the
final result and identify specific management actions. The UNDP Human
Development Index (UNDP, annual) serves this
function. Governments upset with their HDI rankings are obliged to
study all the other data in the Human Development Reports to determine
how to respond.
For
a general discussion of the challenges of measuring sustainability with
indicators, see the paper "Towards
indicators of sustainability" on this site.
INDICATORS
OF ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
The recent SCOPE book (Hak et al. 2007)
provides a good overview of efforts to indicate sustainability, and the
IISD
Compendium is a directory of most indicator processes.
Ony a few of the most significant indicator processes and outputs are
mentioned here.
In response to the call in Agenda 21 for indicators of sustainable
development, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD)
launched a programme
of work on indicators that has produced three versions of an
indicator set and accompanying methodologies for use at the national
level to measure sustainable development. The first set in 1996
included 134 indicators arranged by the chapters of Agenda 21, the
economic, social, environmental and institutional pillars of
sustainable development, and a driving force, state, response
framework. These were reduced in 2001 to 58 core indicators arranged
thematically, and most recently in 2006-2007 to 50 core indicators
within a larger set of 96 indicators of sustainable development.
The Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an
inter-governmental organization of the most developed countries, has
long been a leader in the development and use of environmental
indicators using a pressure-state-response framework, and regularly
published sets of core and key environmental indicators such as Environment at a Glance: OECD
Environmental Indicators.
The Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) of the
International Council for Science (ICSU) has led two projects on
Indicators of Sustainability to review and advance the scientific work
on indicators, each of which has produced a book (Moldan et al, 1997) and (Hak et al. 2007) with inputs from
many experts that provide some of the best summaries of the field.
The International
Institute for Sustainable Development is a leading research
centre on indicators, not only maintaining the Compendium
of indicator initiatives, but producing important documents such as the
Bellagio Principles for assessment (Hardi and Zdan 1997) that describe what is essential for any assessment process using indicators, and a recent strategic review (Pinter et al. 2005).
The International Environment Forum
includes a number of indicator experts among its members, and has
discussed indicators at several of its conferences, including
organizing a Dialogue on Indicators for Sustainability at the Science Forum during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. It has also issued an IEF
position paper on Indicators
for Sustainability. Its next annual conference in the Netherlands in September 2008 will include indicators as one of its major themes.
INDICES
Indicators are often combined into indices to give a broader
measure of sustainability. Some of the most significant are described
below.
The Ecological Footprint is
perhaps the most widely used measure of our consumption relative to the
earth's carrying capacity, because it can be calculated equally well at
different scales. It is the surface needed to supply the needs and
absorb the wastes of an individual, community, or country.
For example, the global average footprint is about 2.2 ha/person, with the USA the highest in the world
at 9.6 ha/person, while the resources available are about 1.9
ha/person, and shrinking as the population rises and resources are
degraded. We overshot the earth's capacity in 1975. The basic approach
is described at http://www.ecologicalfootprint.org/, and the global work in applying it at http://www.globalfootprint.org/. To calculate your own footprint, visit http://www.myfootprint.org.
The Environmental Sustainability Index
(ESI) was developed at Yale and Colunbia Universities in America in
collaboration with the World Economic Forum, and is designed to measure
and rank countries on their environmental sustainability. The 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index is available at http://www.yale.edu/esi/ and http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/es/esi/.
The same groups recently developed an Environmental Performance Index
(EPI) to focus more specifically on how countries are performing at the
present time relative to what is needed to achieve sustainability. The Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index can be downloaded at http://www.yale.edu/epi/.
An interesting initiative from the developing world is the Environmental Vulnerability Index
(EVI) designed by the South Pacific Applied Geosciences Commission in
Fiji in collaboration with UNEP, originally to respond to the concern
of small island developing states to measure their special
vulnerability and to show how to encourage resilience, and then
extended to all countries to give them country profiles of where their
environments are most vulnerable. The complete EVI website is at http://www.vulnerabilityindex.net/.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calculates the Living Planet Index
to show where nations stand in the state of their biodiversity and
the health of the planet's ecosysstems. The WWF Living Planet Report
includes both the Living Planet Index and the Ecological Footprint,
available at http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/living_planet_report/index.cfm
A useful tool developed by the former Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indicators at IISD is the Dashboard of Sustainability,
which can present any set of sustainability indicators in a graphic
format that facilitates their communication and interpretation. See the
Dashboard Collection of datasets at http://esl.jrc.it/dc/dbgal_en.htm.
Other indicators with some relevance to sustainable development include
the Human Development Index prepared each year by UNDP and published in
the Human Development Report (http://hdr.undp.org/reports/default.cfm),
the Global Competitiveness Index released each year by the World
Economic Forum, and the new Humanitarian Response Index 2007 (http://www.fride.org/publication/305/humanitarian-response-index-2007).
LOCAL LEVEL INDICATORS
One of the earliest communities to develop indicators of sustainability for an urban area is Sustainable Seattle (http://www.sustainableseattle.org/) starting in 1993, and with the last Indicators of Sustainable Community report in 1998 (http://www.sustainableseattle.org/Programs/RegionalIndicators/1998IndicatorsRpt.pdf). An extensive participatory process should produce a new set of regional indicators by the end of 2007.
A useful questionnaire and check list that generates qualitative
indicators of the ecological, social and spiritual sustainability of a
community is the Community Sustainability Assessment, available for download at http://gen.ecovillage.org/activities/csa/English/index.html.
At the most fundamental level in society, values are determine how
people behave. A person with a materialistic set of values will seek a
lifestyle where possessions and consumption are important, while
another person may place more value on social relationships in the
family or community, and another of more spiritual orientation may
place the highest value on intangible characteristics of humility, love
and service. Achieving sustainability or other social improvements
requires transforming the values underlying society. While values are
intangible and thus not easy to measure, any indicators that can make
them more visible will assist society to encourage positive or
constructive values and reduce negative or disfunctional values.
Developing value-based indicators is a present challenge that could go
far in guiding society towards greater harmony, sustainability and
peace. A number of initiatives are now moving in this direction. One
pioneering effort is the concept paper "Valuing
Spirituality in Development" which the Bahá'í
International Community presented at the World
Faiths and Development
Dialogue between the President of the World Bank and religious leaders at Lambeth Palace, London, on 18-19 February 1998.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)
maintains a Compendium
which provides a Global
Directory to Indicator Initiatives: http://www.iisd.org/measure/compendium/
In
response to
Agenda 21, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development decided on a
Programme
of Work of the UN Division for Sustainable Development on Indicators of
Sustainable Development for
use at the national level, and a third revised set of indicators has
recently been adopted. Documentation on the process and its outputs is
available at http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/
indicators/isd.htm.
The Millennium
Development Goals
adopted by the United Nations in 2000 have become the focus of global
efforts at poverty alleviation. Indicators have been developed for the
specific goals and targets and are available at: http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/default.aspx.
The UN System-wide
Earthwatch web site includes a section on indicators (http://earthwatch.unep.net/indicators/index.php)
which provides access to much of the United Nations work in this area,
as well as to other indicator processes.
Bahá'í
International Community.
1998. Valuing
Spirituality
in Development: Initial
Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually Based Indicators
for
Development. A concept paper written for the
World
Faiths and Development
Dialogue, Lambeth Palace, London, 18-19 February 1998.
Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, London. Available at: http://www.bcca.org/ief/bicvsid.htm
and in french:
français.
This
paper describes a pioneering approach to value-based indicators.
Dahl,
Arthur Lyon. 1995. Towards Indicators of Sustainability.
Paper presented at the SCOPE Scientific Workshop on Indicators of
Sustainable Development, Wuppertal, Germany,
15-17 November 1995. http://www.bcca.org/ief/el/indicators/inddahl.htm
Hak, Tomas, Bedrich
Moldan and Arthur Lyon Dahl (eds.), 2007. Sustainability
Indicators: A
Scientific Assessment. SCOPE Vol. 67. Washington, D.C., Island Press. 413 p.
This book provides the most recent state-of-the-art in indicators of
sustainability, including conceptual, methodological and policy
challenges, various methodological, systems and sectoral approaches,
and case studies. It is a good place to start for someone seriously
interested in working on such indicators.
Hardi, Peter, and Terrence Zdan, 1997. Assessing Sustainable Development:
Principles in Practice. IISD, Winnipeg. 166 p. http://www.iisd.org/publications/pub.aspx?pno=279
This basic reference on indicators includes the Bellagio Principles and a series of case studies for their application.
IAEA, 2005. Energy
Indicators for Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies
STI/PUB/1222,
161 p.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has prepared this set of energy
indicators for sustainable development
to help countries to track their progress. It can be ordered
or downloaded from http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PubDetails.asp?pubId=7201
For
Pintér, László,
Peter Hardi and Peter Bartelmus,
2005. Sustainable Development Indicators: Proposals for a
Way Forward. International Institute for Sustainable
Development,
Winnipeg. 42 p. http://www.iisd.org/publications/pub.aspx?pno=769
This paper commissioned by the United Nations Division for
Sustainable Development shows that sustainable development
indicators have the
potential to turn the general concept of sustainability into action.
UNDP
Human Development Reports are issued
each year with a particular theme. The 2007 report is on climate
change. The reports include human development indicators for 175
countries, summarized in the Human Development Index. The reports can
be downloaded from http://hdr.undp.org/reports/default.cfm
UNESCO-SCOPE, 2006, Indicators of
Sustainability: Reliable Tool for Decision Making,
UNESCO-SCOPE Policy Briefs no.1 - http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001500/150005e.pdf
This
short
illustrated brochure written by Arthur Dahl aims to convince policy
makers to start using indicators for decision making.
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Last
updated 9 January 2008