ENVIRONMENTAL AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS

For State of the Environment Reporting to be useful it is important that relevant information is collected and presented to decision-makers in a user-friendly and standardised format. This information must cover the important issues that affect the social, economic and biophysical environment. Environmental indicators measure features of the environment and describe the extent of change of the driving forces, pressures, state, impacts and responses (consistent with the D-P-S-I-R Model).

Criteria for indicator selection (DEAT 2001):

• The indicator should be based on good quality data, readily accessible and available at a reasonable cost;
• The indicator should be based on data that is accurate, reliable, statistically and scientifically verifiable. Metadata ("data about data") pertaining to the indicator should ideally be developed to ascertain data quality such as levels of sensitivity, uncertainty, variability, precision, accuracy and error;
• The indicator should be sensitive and able to detect relatively small changes in the environment or system;
• The indicator should be applicable to the relevant and correct spatial and temporal scale. Long-term data is required to identify environmental trends;
• The indicator should provide timely and relevant information, preferably linked to policy and management issues;
• The indicator should provide information which measures a particular aspect of the environment or sustainable development which is relevant and important to decision makers. These should preferably be related to goals, targets and objectives;
• The indicator should process complex information and present this in a simplified and consistent form which is readily understood by the target audience;
• Norms, standards and guidelines should be developed for each indicator to facilitate interpretation;
• The data collection process should have minimal environmental impact.

The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism is currently developing a set of national indicators that can be used to describe the State of the Environment in South Africa. This initiative is in line with the international approach to implementing Agenda 21 through monitoring and reporting on sustainable development. This national indicator initiative depends on the gathering of information at national, provincial and local level.

It is, therefore, important that provinces adopt a set of indicators that, apart from monitoring and describing the provincial state of the environment, also contributes to the national assessment of the state of the environment. The North West Province has participated in the national indicator programme, but still has to select which indicators are the most relevant, feasible and practicable for future monitoring of the State of the Environment of the Province. A set of proposed indicators, derived from the suite of national indicators is presented in Table 1. Table 1 groups the indicators into several themes: human settlements, land use, atmosphere and climate change, inland water, biodiversity and natural heritage, waste management and integrated indicators (adapted from the National Core Set of Environmental Indicators, DEAT 2001).

Table 1. A list of proposed Environmental and Sustainable Development Indicators for South Africa (excluding marine and coastal indicators) (Source: DEAT 2001).

HUMAN SETTLEMENTS INDICATORS

Level 1: adequate data is currently available for the indicator and the indicator can be used without incurring additional data collection costs.
Level 2: the indicator is considered to be feasible, but data availability is limited.
Level 3: the indicator is not currently being used, and no data exists

References