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Ecologically Sustainable Development
Indicators are simplified measures that best represent key elements of a complex system. The best known and most widely used indicators used by policy-makers are economic indicators. Measures such as CPI and balance of payments provide aggregated indicators of changes in the economy that are used by analysts to provide information on overall economic performance.
Over the last decade there has been substantial work on the development of environmental indicators. Both the United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have developed comprehensive sets of environmental indicators linked with their environmental monitoring and review processes. Detailed sets of environmental indicators have been developed in Australia, and may be examined in detail at the State of Environment Reporting web site.
Sustainability indicators relate economic, social and environmental factors, and therefore provide integrated information as to how a nation, region, sector or activity is performing in achieving the goals and objectives of sustainable development.
The concept of developing sustainability indicators as policy tools for integrated decision making gained momentum during the development of Agenda 21. The international community continues to play a strong catalytic and intellectual role in the development of sustainability indicators, primarily through work being undertaken by the OECD and the CSD.
In 2001, Commonwealth Ministers endorsed a set of headline sustainability indicators for Australia.
The publication Are We Sustaining Australia: A Report Against Headline Sustainability Indicators for Australia is Australia's first report against the set of headline sustainability indicators.
The 24 indicators were selected to collectively measure Australia's national performance against the core objectives of the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (NSESD). Comparing successive sets of indicators will help to determine Australia's progress towards sustainability.