Box 1A Environmental indicators

Attempts to monitor the state of environmental resources have increased the volume of environmental data and information available. However, much relevant data are still missing and those which are usable are patchy and incomplete. Many data are collected in order to meet specific regulatory purposes, rather than the broader aims of environmental policy making.

To enhance the ability to monitor environmental change, sets of environmental indicators have been put forward by international and national organisations. The minimum level of organisation of data that is required (coordination and compatibility) is a list of selected descriptive indicators needed to produce an environmental quality profile. These are particularly useful where it is necessary to present social and economic indicators along with environmental data in order to provide a full picture of the state of the environment in a particular country or region.

In order to provide policy-relevant information, however, it is necessary to select environmental indicators which can help explain changes in the environment and their relationships with human activities. Indeed, this reasoning dictated the choice of data to be included in this report. The lack of sufficient understanding and agreement at all levels as to what constitutes a core set of indicators can partly explain the inadequacy of the results (data availability and quality being two other important confounders).

Three main groups of environmental indicators can be distinguished, and these have their counterparts in the data presented in this report:

1. state-of-the-environment indicators;
2. stressor indicators;
3. pressure indicators.

Environmental indicators are useful for several reasons, including:

• their ability to catch the 'essence' of a state of the environment in a few statistics;
• their capability for allowing comparisons between countries and between regions and the global environment;
• their capability for deriving trends over time (eg, between successive state-of-the-environment reports);
• their potential for measuring the success of environmental programmes and policies.

Further refinements can be made to provide more useful information to policy makers. Response indicators can be developed to describe what society is doing to deal with environmental problems (such as environmental abatement expenditures) or for public opinion. Performance indicators (such as those currently being developed by the OECD) can be devised which relate to clearly defined norms (legislative or scientifically based). In the longer term, indicators of sustainability are needed, as called for in Agenda 21; essentially this means addressing the question of what level of socio-economic development is compatible with a sustainable use of natural resources, which in turn requires some notion of appropriate norms of sustainability.