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The purpose of sustainability indicators is to guide political
decision-making towards sustainable development. They ought to be the
basis of improved data collection and processing, and permit an analysis
of the state of and progress towards sustainable development. To serve
for communication purposes, they should reduce complexity, be easily understandable
and limited in number.
In order to permit policy assessments, it must be clear
which value of the indicator is more or less desirable than another one.
This requires a gradient from good to bad results provided by either ordinal
or cardinal scales, and the clear definition of targets. Once these are
given, sustainability indicators characterising the major sustainability
relevant trends can be defined as performance indicators, measuring the
distance to target and the progress made. To provide a sound basis for
decision making such indicators have to be
- general, i.e. not dependent on a specific
situation, culture or society;
- indicative, i.e. truly representative
of the phenomenon intended to characterise;
- sensitive, i.e. they have to react early
and sensibly to changes in what they are monitoring, in order to permit
monitoring of trends or the successes of policies; and
- robust, i.e. directionally safe with
no significant changes in case of minor changes in the methodology or
improvements in the data base.
Indicators to be used on different levels of decision making
obviously need different levels of detail.
Whereas there are abundant indicators for all four dimensions
of sustainability, comprehensive sets and systems are still lacking, SERI
develops such integrated sets of indicators, focussing on the interlinkages
of the dimensions of sustainable development. As sustainable development
means to reconcile the at least partly diverging interests along the four
dimensions, it is the interlinkage and mutual integration of different
policy fields that is decisive for the success of sustainability strategies.
SERI develops indicators to monitor such integration processes in a systematic
manner.
On the environmental dimension, the focus is on the use
of environmental space, i.e. the total throughput of resources with dematerialization
the policy objective. Indicators are developed for land use intensity,
energy consumption and in particular for material flows (TMR, TMI, MIPS).
For the institutional dimension, core and interlinkage indicators have
been derived from the objectives defined in the UN's Agenda 21, the document
adopted at the UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992.
For the social and the economic dimension, some conceptual
papers are available, and fully comprehensive indicator systems to be
integrated with the other dimensions are in preparation.
Headline indicators for ecological sustainability
A generally accepted, single measurement quantity does not
exist in the field of ecology as yet. In political discussions, this constitutes
a competitive disadvantage of ecology vis-à-vis economic and social
policy since, in these areas, the impact of certain actions can be assessed
and justified with considerably more ease by means of their indicators.
Consequently, it is much easier to find arguments in favour of measures
promoting the economy or creating jobs.
For want of a single measurement quantity of sustainability
accepted all over the EU, the numerous existing environmental indicators
have to be reduced to a few key "headlines". These reduced set
will, of course, not be capable of reflecting the response of the ecosphere
in its entire complexity (and should not do so); such a reduction is not
based on scientific, but on political reasons.
We propose a political reduction of the indicators based
on six headlines from which so-called headliners or headline indicators
can be derived:
This core set of headlines (by definition) does not claim
to be complete; it does, however, claim to provide a directionally safe
orientation and is the basis for comparisons of individual sectors and
policy areas.
Material-flow based indicators
The micro level:
In 1992, the concept of material intensity per unit service (or function)-in
short MIPS-had been proposed by Schmidt-Bleek as an initial measure for
estimating the eco-efficiency (the life-cycle wide environmental impact
intensity) of infrastructures, goods, and services.
MIPS is computed in mass (of material input MI) per total units of service
(S) delivered by the good over its entire life span. Manufacturing, transport,
packaging, operating, re-use, recycling, and re-manufacturing are accounted
for and so is the final waste disposal.
The MIPS concept is not only a measure of material flows used for monitoring
progress toward sustainability. It can be used to design the optimal eco-efficiency
of goods and infrastructures. The goal is in all cases to reap as many
units of service as possible from each 'service delivery machine' for
as little material (and low material intensive energy) input as necessary.
The macro level:
The Total Material Requirement (TMR) comprises the national and transnational
(i.e. the global induced by imports) material extraction from the environment.
The TMR may be regarded as an integrated indicator that relates to the
global environmental pressure associated with the physical basis of an
economy. No economy would work without the yearly input of materials,
either from domestic or foreign origin. Thus, TMR can be interpreted as
an indicator for the environmental pressure associated especially with
the production and consumption of an economy. For practical reasons, TMR
is confined to materials other than water and air.
TMI may be used as a basis to indicate the overall material productivity
of an economy. The relation of GDP and TMR provides the material productivity
of GDP.
One may argue that any country is responsible for the environmental burden
of its exports and that the material flows should not be assigned to the
importing country. Indeed, material flow accounting allows to calculate
the global Total Material Consumption (TMC) of a national or regional
economy by considering also those cradle-to-border flows that are associated
with the exports.
Further indicators on the macro level:
DMI (Direct material input) : Domestic extraction plus imports
DMC (Domestic material consumption): DMI minus exports
PTB (Physical trade balance): Imports minus exports
The sectoral level:
In order to specify priorities for dematerialization measures the overall
account for a national economy may be allocated to the different economic
sectors. Several rules exist to attribute TMI to the economic sectors
respectively to their economic outputs.
First, the TMI of the whole economy can be attributed directly to the
several sectors (incl. private household) according to their domestic
ressource extractions and imports. As for these direct MI, the bulk of
the inputs is usually concentrated on a few sectors, like coal (incl.
lignite) and construction materials and non-iron metals.
Another possibility steems from the application of input-output techniques
that allow a reattribution of the MI to the final demanded goods. The
MI among the final demanded goods is much more even and complex, with
no sector´s output dominating. In other words, the points of entry
are much less diffused than the points and ways of exit, which is an important
precondition for effective policy regulation.
The regional level:
On the regional level material-flow based indicators can serve as an indicator
for the eco-efficiency of regions.
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