BOX 4H
THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATOR PROCESS IN THE UNITED STATES

David Berry

The Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI) Group was created in 1994. This group has played a major role in the development of the indicators of progress towards the goals of the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) included in the PCSD report.

THE TASKS OF THE ISD GROUP

The tasks of the ISD Group are to:

• Create an information access system which facilitates easy, low cost, user-friendly electronic access to federal data and information relevant to indicators for sustainable development. Communities, corporations and other interested parties should have access to detailed underlying data to evaluate the implications of indicator trends for their own sectors and interests. 
• Develop an analytic framework for national indicators and a set of indicators of sustainable development. As resources allow, the ISD Group will also facilitate efforts by communities to develop regional and local indicators by providing data and encouraging communication between communities which have successfully developed indicators and those seeking to do so. 
• Provide reports with information on progress in the development of indicators of sustainable development and contribute to US reports on sustainable development to international organizations. 
• Recommend a long-term strategy through which all levels of government. NGOs and industry can contribute to the development of indicators of progress towards sustainability. This effort is expected to take many years. A sample set of ISD will be released soon which draws upon existing data and methods. Our efforts to date are only a start on a long-term project.

THE ISD SELECTION PROCESS

The ISD Group has applied an even-handed approach to all the factors affecting the well-being of people in the United States. Rather than gathering a panel of experts in closed door sessions. participants from many different disciplines and a variety of government agencies considered the value of indicators. The goal was to increase the relevance of the findings to a wide variety of decision-makers.

THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATOR FRAMEWORK

The ISD Group wanted to develop a framework that would:

• be directly linked to the most widely used definition of sustainable development in the US; 
• consider a sufficiently long period of time and the well-being of future generations; 
• give balanced and consistent treatment to economic, environmental and social factors; 
• integrate concepts from economics, environmental sciences and social sciences;
• hold promise of gaining acceptance from a wide variety of stakeholders.

The group concluded that as indicators moved from consideration of the environment to consideration of sustainable development as a whole, the PSR framework posed some problems. For one, human inventions over time including the wheel, indoor plumbing and the microchip, would not be considered, by most people, to be merely pressures on the natural environment. Such assets are able to contribute some positive value and should be treated as such by the indicator framework. The group also concluded that a key feature of sustainable development is that it focuses on the opportunities we pass along to the future as well as focusing on current conditions. In keeping with this thinking, the ISD Group adopted a framework that would include pressure, state and response, but the context would be broadened by emphasizing two key components:

1. Endowments are defined as the economic, environmental, and social resources, assets, or productive capacities inherited from nature or previous generations and used today to meet human needs and wants. These endowments become the legacy passed along to future generations which shape their opportunities.

Some examples of endowments include:

• built capital such as factories, houses and highways;  
• natural resources such as fisheries and oil fields; 
• environmental systems that provide air and water; 
• social systems such as the capacity to educate young people, community organizations and the Constitution and the rule of law.

2. Current Outputs and Results are defined as the economic, environmental, and social goods, services and experiences currently enjoyed by the human population. Some examples of current outputs include:

• the consumer goods and services used; 
• the air that humans and animals breathe and the water they drink; 
• the degree of personal security experienced under a system of government which can determine who will govern without violence or repression and protect individuals from violence and disorder.

Indicators of Current Outputs and Results have always been of great interest to current generations because they provide measures of our quality of life. In the context of sustainable development, they are of added interest because they also reflect the current productivity of our endowments.

In its review of other frameworks, the ISD Group found that there was substantial effort to represent and measure activities that change the elements which were included in the endowments. Environmental indicator frameworks include pressures for that reason and economic indicator frameworks include investment and depreciation. In the ISD Framework, these are referred to as 'Driving Forces'.

Driving Forces are the proximate causes of changes in endowments" Some examples include:

• the construction of new factories, houses or highways;
• the depletion of natural resources through extractive activities such as fishing or oil production; 
• the degradation of air and water quality through the discharge of pollutants;
• the strengthening of social institutions.

Driving Forces can either increase or decrease the capacity of our endowments to satisfy the needs and wants of both current and future generations. The ISD Group recognized that Driving Forces are a part of the economic, environmental, and social processes which contribute to current outputs and results. Thus, in the ISD Framework, Driving Forces are shown as the part of these processes that directly change endowments.

Some good examples of these processes include:

• production of consumer goods and services; 
• atmospheric and hydrologic processes that disperse and transform pollutants; 
• social processes that mobilize individuals to participate in new organizations.

Many decision-making processes use information and could use ISDs. Thus, decision-making processes are shown as a part of the processes to be recognized in the ISD framework. For simplicity, only the ISDs are shown as inputs to the decision-making processes, although there are certainly many other types of information on which decisions are based.