Selected indicators of the German Strategy for Sustainable Development on the environment and the economy

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. Most of the data underlying the indicators come from official statistics. The current indicator report 2010 contains the following sustainability indicators:

1.a Energy productivity
1.b Raw material productivity
2. Greenhouse gas emissions
3. Share of renewable energy sources in total energy consumption
4. Increase in land use for housing and transport area
5. Species diversity and landscape quality
6. National deficit
7. Gross fixed capital formation in relation to GDP
8. Private and public spending on research and development
9.a 18- to 24-year-olds without a school leaving certificate
9.b 25-year-old university graduates
9.c Share of students starting a degree course
10.Gross domestic product per capita
11.a Intensity of goods transport
11.b Intensity of passenger transport
11.c Share of railway traffic and inland water transport in goods transport performance
12.a Nitrogen surplus
12.b Organic farming
13. Air pollution
14.a b Premature mortality
14.c d Proportion of adolescents and adults who smoke
14. e Proportion of obese people
15. Burglaries in home
16.a b Employment rate
17. All-day care provision for children
18. Gender pay gap
19. Foreign school leavers with a school-leaving certificate
20. Share of expenditures for official development assistance in gross national income
21. German imports from developing countries

Compared to the 2002 sustainability strategy, the set of indicators was slightly modified and supplemented in 2008.

A set of selected indicators of the sustainability strategy referring to the environment and the economy is also updated regularly and early by the Federal Statistical Office and is offered on its website (see "Indicators on the environment and the economy"). Referring to the above list, this regards indicators 1 to 7 and 10 to 13.

In addition to the system of national accounts and its satellite system of environmental-economic accounts, economic accounting in Germany comprises a satellite system of socio-economic accounts (SEA), which is currently being developed. All three systems use uniform concepts and classifications (i.e. production by branches, individual consumption expenditure by activity fields, households by household types, etc.). As a result, the data compiled in the context of national, environmental-economic and socio-economic accounting are fully comparable and can be combined without any problems.

The system of accounts in national accounting reflects - in statistical terms - the economic processes at the national level. Environmental-economic accounts supplement the aforementioned accounts by describing the interrelations between the economy and the environment. This approach is based on the knowledge that a national economy uses not only labour and capital, but also natural resources in its economic activities (production and consumption). On the one hand, raw materials and water are withdrawn from the natural environment and areas are used, for instance, for agricultural production, as industry and trade locations, or for living and recreational purposes. On the other, nature provides services to the economy, for instance, by assimilating and partly degrading residues and pollutants. Hence the national economy makes use of the natural environment not only by withdrawing materials and energy, but also by discharging general waste and waste water and also air-polluting substances.

Those direct flows of material and energy from the environment to the economy and vice versa as well as land use are a first form of interaction between the economy and the environment. From the perspective of the environment these interactions are pressures and impacts which lead to changes in the state of the environment or the stock of natural assets. On the one hand, those changes are of a quantitative nature (e.g. declining raw material deposits) while, on the other, they have many qualitative aspects, too (deteriorating air quality due to pollutant emissions, smaller diversity of species in ecosystems, etc.).

Finally, the system of socio-economic accounts is designed to supplement national accounting in that it reflects the essential relations between the economic and the social systems. The focus is on aspects such as the age, education and qualification levels of persons in employment, income and expenditure of households in a breakdown by groups of households, time use by people and so on. The activities the Federal Statistical Office has undertaken to develop a system of socio-economic accounts have been an important step towards adequately reflecting the social sustainability dimension in the context of economic accounting.

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