Environmental indicators

The 2002 national strategy for sustainable development of the Federal Government has made sustainability a fundamental principle of Germany’s policy. To measure the effectiveness of the strategy, a set of sustainability indicators was specified for several thematic fields at the political level. Furthermore, both target values and years were assigned to the majority of these indicators. At two-year intervals, the indicator trends have been reflected and analysed in an indicator report. The Federal Statistical Office has been responsible for compiling the reports.

Sustainability politics require a holistic political approach. Analysis must not be confined to unrelated consideration of individual indicators and their respective degrees of goal achievement. What really matters is an integrated analytical approach, balancing conflicts in goals and ensuring at the same time that the goals set are achieved in policy fields such as economy, environment and social affairs. Analysis in the context of such a political approach, by necessity, must rely on a data base, which integrates all fields, of the kind provided, for instance, by national accounts in official statistics.

In the so-called “Data and Information Pyramid” we find basic data located in the pyramid’s wide basement, whereas indicators are in its top section. They are linked with each other by way of accounting. Whilst indicators are mainly used as a tool of communication for the public at large and the media and as a gauge measuring the success of political programmes, the accounting approach makes it possible to perform integrated analytical studies, which reveal the underlying causes of changes and enable us to map out action that should be taken. ‘Accounting’ means that an entire system (in the case of EEA the system economy-environment) is examined as completely and consistently as possible, rather than a selected theme or problem (which, as a rule, is the case with indicators).

Accounting in Germany consists of national accounts and the respective satellite systems, that is environmental-economic accounting (EEA) and socio-economic accounting (which is still under development). All of the three systems use uniform concepts of presentation and classification. The use of a common classification makes it possible to compare and crosslink the results obtained in and between the various accounting systems without any problems.

The basic features of an accounting approach - system orientation, completeness and consistency, its largely subject-independent nature - ensure its specific usefulness for environment-related indicators in sustainability reporting:

• The data items made available for the calculation of indicators, unlike basic statistics, are aggregated at national level and describe the system economy-environment. From a methodological aspect it is helpful to have indicators in terms of highly aggregated or specifically selected environmental variables, which can be derived from and linked with scientific concepts such as EEA in a systematic and uniform manner.
• Furthermore, the results of EEA can underpin the indicators with detailed data records available in a consistent breakdown. This makes it possible to supplement the sets of indicators, which are typically available as lists, by indicating interlinkages. This concerns the relations between various dimensions of sustainability (for EEA mainly economy and environment) as well as the connections between various environmental themes. To meet the political claim that environmental needs should be integrated in sector policies, we need a data base that enables us to analyse economic and environmental facts of a given sector in an integrated manner and to consider the entire effects of the different sector policies in total.

• Derivation of aggregate indicators. Of particular interest are those indicators which provide measures of efficiency (productivities or intensities) obtained by combining monetary economic aggregates with physical environmental indicators.
• Derivation of sectoral indicators (for instance, specific energy consumption of economic sectors or fields of production). Sector-specific indicators of efficiency are of special importance here as well.
• Decomposition analysis (an indicator’s chronological evolution explained by changes in factors of influence, for example emission trends related to the increase in efficiency, structural developments, changes in general demand and so on).
• Input-output analysis: Linking environmental burdens data in physical measures with input-output tables in monetary or physical terms to calculate the cumulated effects, which not only take into account the direct burden (for example, direct energy consumption in a field of production), but also the indirect burden (for instance, consideration of the energy used up in all stages of manufacturing a product); this makes it also possible, for example, to quantify the effect that displacing environmentally intensive activities to the rest of the world has on a country’s own environmental burden.