Composite indicators of environmental sustainability

Bedřich Moldan[1], Tomáš Hák, Jan Kovanda, Miroslav Havránek, Petra Kušková

CharlesUniversityEnvironmentCenter, Prague

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Environmental indicators have been regularly and widely used for a long period of time by many intergovernmental and international institutions e.g. OECD, UN and its organizations and programs, EU, World Resources Institute. With the emergence of the idea of sustainabledevelopment since the Brundtland Report in 1987 the concept of the environment and inevitably the need for environmental indicators is changing. I propose to use the term environmental sustainability to stress the view of environment as one of the three pillars of sustainable development. In this respect specific requests arise for indicators of environmental sustainability in order to capture the relationship between environmental and other dimensions of sustainability. Indicators such as decoupling indicators are an example of this. There is also a growing demand for composite indicators able to cover the whole environmental pillar in some way. The rationale behind this request is obvious: Decision-makers as well the public at large would like to see at one glance “How we are doing in respect to environment”.

A successful indicator must satisfy three criteria: salience, credibility and legitimacy (ICSU, 2002). Salience means that the indicator is interesting, useful and relevant for the user. It must show something “that really matters”. The most important question then is: What is really important in respect to environmental sustainability? This question is the most important one and the paper focuses on this issue. The presented analysis is based on the scrutiny of the frameworkssuch as the Driving Force-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework used by the European Environment Agency. As the user is mostly a decision-maker it implies a request for policy relevance. Policy implications should be obvious and unambiguous. Among other things the indicator should be able to serve as a benchmarking instrument, to show trends in time and set targets. Credibility deals with the scientific validity of the indicator i.e. quality of data used for its construction, the methodology of aggregation and other transformations, adequacy of presentation and similar issues. The third aspect is legitimacywhich is the most difficult feature to define. It touches the perception of the indicator, its methods of construction and the competence of the producer itself as seen from the point of view of a wide range of potential users and stakeholders whose interests, values, or beliefs might be affected by the indicator. The most important stakeholder are national governments, businesses and civil society organizations. Recent history of the development of the “agreed set of indicators” by OECD or by the EU (the fourteen Structural indicators) shows that the issue of legitimacy is a crucial one.

So far several attempts were made to develop a usable composite indicator. A brief analysis of six such indicators is presented in this paper together with respective scores for G-7 countries: Environmental Sustainability Index (World Economic Forum), Well-being Index (IUCN), Ecological Footprint (Wackernagel&Rees), Living Planet Index (WWF), Total Material Requirement (Eurostat), and Dashboard of Sustainability (The Consultative Group).The salience, credibility and legitimacy aspects are compared with well-known composite indicators from other fields namely Human Development Index and Gross Domestic Product. As the analysis in the paper shows none of the analyzed indicators is a suitable candidate for a universally acceptable composite indicator. Our own proposal for a composite indicator based primarily on the concept of the pressure on environment called Geo-Biosphere Load (GBLoad) is presented. GBLoad is an aggregate of three components: indicator of material flow, indicator of energy use and indicator of the use of land. The resulting indicator tries to encompass not purely environmental phenomena but to capture alsoa crucial linkage to human activities.

[1] Corresponding author: U Krize 8, Prague 5, 158 00, Czech Republic;