Measuring Progress at Rio and Beyond
This post was originally featured on Sage Magazine and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy blog.
At the US-Canada Citizens Summit for Sustainable Development March 24-25, I facilitated a group discussion on metrics and indicators for measuring progress toward sustainable development goals. Indicators and targets are mentioned throughout the “Zero Draft” document titled “The Future We Want,” a 19-page document that distills over 6,000 some pages of viewpoints from member states and major groups. This document has been serving as the basis for negotiations, and hopefully will be adopted as some sort of “outcome document” at the Earth Summit in Rio this June.
What does the Zero Draft say about indicators and metrics? Paragraph 33 makes mention of a “set of indicators to measure progress” toward implementation of countries’ implementation of green economy. Paragraph 43 elaborates a recognition of the importance of measuring global progress. The goal of establishing indicators and measures “to evaluate implementation” is stated for achievement in the next three years. Subsequent to Paragraph 108, which makes mention of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to complement the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), Paragraph 109 states, “We also propose that progress towards these Goals should be measured by appropriate indicators and evaluated by specific targets to be achieved possibly by 2030.” Lastly, included in Paragraph 111 is a statement that expresses agreement of the limitations of GDP as a measure of well-being.
Discussion of metrics, indicators, and targets to better quantify and track progress toward green economy, poverty eradication, and sustainable development goals came up in every session I attended during the Summit. Representatives from civil society, the private sector, municipal governments, and academia voiced the need for better data and metrics. How does a city know how much money it will save from energy efficiency measures, and how will it know which measures to implement and how those policies are performing? How does a country know how its ecosystems are functioning if there is no data by which to measure its conditions? How can cities be considered “sustainable” without metrics to define them?
These are daunting questions that decision-makers at every level are facing. Unfortunately, through my observations of the latest informal negotiations on the Zero Draft at the United Nations this past week, discussions on metrics haven’t progressed past the conceptual level at the UN – what the insertion of “planetary boundaries” means and what the scope of green economy should include, for example.
The 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) can be a possible solution and specific tool that can help bring some level of clarity to the discussion. A joint project between The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, the 2012 EPI provides countries with a comparative framework by which to assess environmental performance on a range of issues. These include the environmental burden of disease, air quality, water quality, forestry, agriculture, water quantity, climate change and energy issues, biodiversity and fisheries. Incorporating the last decade’s worth of globally-available data on these issues, countries can clearly see areas in which they perform well, where they lag, and how they’ve improved or declined overall.
The EPI framework and methodology already measure progress toward some key environmental goals that came out of Conventions originally negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit. An indicator on biodiversity and habitat protection gauges how close or far countries are from protecting 17 percent of each terrestrial biome within its borders – a target set by the Convention on Biological Diversity at its 10th Conference of Parties in Nagoya, Japan in 2010. The EPI also uses a target for carbon dioxide emission levels established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body on climate change whose work supports the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Therefore, countries can already get a sense of how they are doing on key issues originally identified at Rio 20 years ago, as well as an indication of how far they still have to come.
While the EPI provides a starting point, there are still persistent data gaps that prevent a more complete picture of sustainability. We identified several of these gaps in our analysis, including missing global data for recycling rates, toxic and chemical exposures, heavy metals, municipal waste management and treatment, desertification, water quality (sedimentation and organic/industrial pollutants), nuclear safety, climate adaptation, agricultural soil quality and erosion, to just name a few. These gaps are indications that while we have come a long way in terms of improving data and measurement practices for environment and sustainability issues, we still have much further to go if we hope to be able to better understand the complexity of ecosystems, human impact on the environment, and whether we have achieved green economic growth.
Although it is unlikely that Rio will produce a new indicator for capturing social, economic and environmental progress that will replace GDP, leaders can at least begin to move toward a definition of a set of indicators that better encapsulate sustainable development, poverty eradication, and green economy (all identified themes of the Earth Summit this June). This way countries, cities, organizations, industries, and individuals can begin to identify what information needs to be collected and where investments in monitoring are needed. But for these improvements to happen, negotiators must also earmark financing to support data collection and monitoring.
A summary of the main conclusions from this session as well as others are available in the Outcome Document, which can be accessed on www.citizenssummit.org as soon as it’s compiled.
If we agree to “think globally”, it becomes evident that riveting attention on GROWTH could be a grave mistake because we are denying how economic and population growth in the communities in which we live cannot continue as it has until now. Each village’s resources are being dissipated, each town’s environment degraded and every city’s fitness as place for our children to inhabit is being threatened. To proclaim something like, ‘the meat of any community plan for the future is, of course, growth’ fails to acknowledge that many villages, towns and cities are already ‘built out’, and also ‘filled in’ with people. If the quality of life we enjoy now is to be maintained for the children, then limits on economic and population growth will have to be set. By so doing, we choose to “act locally” and sustainably.
More economic and population growth are no longer sustainable in many too many places on the surface of Earth because biological constraints and physical limitations are immutably imposed upon ever increasing human consumption, production and population activities of people in many communities where most of us reside. Inasmuch as the Earth is finite with frangible environs, there comes a point at which GROWTH is unsustainable. There is much work to done locally. But that effort cannot reasonably begin without sensibly limiting economic and population growth.
To quote another source, “We face a wide-open opportunity to break with the old ways of doing the town’s business…..” That is a true statement. But the necessary “break with the old ways” of continous economic and population growth is not what is occurring. There is a call for a break with the old ways, but the required changes in behavior are not what is being proposed as we plan for the future. What is being proposed and continues to occur is more of the same, old business-as-usual overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the very activities that appear to be growing unsustainbly. More business-as-usual could soon become patently unsustainable, both locally and globally. A finite planet with the size, composition and environs of the Earth and a community with the boundaries, limited resources and wondrous climate of villages, towns and cities where we live may not be able to sustain much longer the economic and population growth that is occurring on our watch. Perhaps necessary changes away from UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH and toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises are in the offing.
Think globally while there is still time and act locally before it is too late for human action to make any difference in the clear and presently dangerous course of unfolding human-induced ecological events, both in our planetary home and in our villages, towns and cities.
This situation is no longer deniable. During my lifetime, many have understood the Global Predicament we are facing now, but only a few ‘voices in the wilderness’ were willing to speak out loudly and clearly about what everyone can see. It is not a pretty sight. The human community has precipitated a planetary emergency that only humankind is capable of undoing. The present ‘Unsustainable Path’ has to be abandoned in favor of a “road less travelled by”. It is late; there is no time left to waste. Perhaps now we will gather our remarkably abundant, distinctly human resources and respond ably to the daunting, human-induced, global challenges before us, the ones that threaten life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation. Many voices, many more voices are needed for making necessary changes.
We must think globally, and global challenges, we should say stop. Thanks for writing.