State of the Environment 2011 (SoE 2011)
State of the Environment 2011 Committee. Australia state of the environment 2011.
Independent report to
the Australian Government Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.
Canberra: DSEWPaC, 2011.
1 Approach
4.1 National context
SoE 2011 draws from both national and jurisdictional-level reports. At a national scale, two main reports relate to SoE reporting: the five-yearly intergenerational report from the Australian Government Treasury11 and the Measure of Australia’s progress series from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.12 Although these reports focus on social and economic sustainability, more recent editions of both reports include more coverage of environmental issues, and analyses of the linkages among social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability.
Other national reporting protocols, such as those relating to air quality standards in the National Environment Protection Measures established under the National Environment Protection Council Act 1994, are also incorporated in the analyses presented in this report.
At a jurisdictional level, each state and territory produces a regular state of the environment report and the chapters in this report draw strongly on relevant findings from these.
The jurisdictional reports have some limitations that make it difficult for them to be used to inform the national report, as there are many practical and longstanding differences in approaches to SoE reporting across jurisdictions. However, considerable effort has been made to align the scope, structure and methodologies of jurisdictional reports to strengthen their quality and complementarities, and to avoid duplication. In 2000, the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council released Core environmental indicators to be used for reporting on the state of the environment,13 which was aimed at encouraging consistency to allow SoE information to be comparable across jurisdictions. A cross-jurisdictional SoE Reporting Forum has also been established with members from all Australian SoE reporting agencies, to provide a mechanism to improve quality and linkages across SoE reports.
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