Monitoring environmental progress : a report on work in progress

There are important gaps in our understanding of the facets of environmentally sustainable development, but there are also areas in which data collection could be streamlined. Finding the right balance will require more attention to the gray areas of the subject. This publication is a first step toward finding that balance. It poses a series of compelling questions that properly targeted indicators for environmentally sustainable development should help to answer. The discussion, therefore, explores the strengths and weaknesses of available indicators and suggests avenues for developing new ones. Chapter 1 suggests that progress has been achieved by using forest area and its loss as indicators of environmental health. Chapter 2 offers an analytical framework to guide discussions of biodiversity and direct attention to the most relevant monitoring tasks. Chapter 3 emphasizes the fact that excessive use of the ecosystem as a pollution sink is likely to undermine the health of ecosystems, impose constraints on economic development, and above all, jeopardize human health. Chapter 4 explores technology's role in keeping development sustainable and the degree to which economic processes use natural resources efficiently. Chapter 5 shows that there is considerable scope for improvement in the areas where governments are able to encourage or discourage the rational use of natural resources through taxes, subsidies, or less direct approaches. Chapter 6 discusses emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Chapter 7 introduces Bank work on a short-cut approach to "green" national accounts that yields time series for some ninety countries. Chapter 8 contains an attempt at measuring the wealth of nations - in part to emphasize that natural capital ought to be viewed as a factor of production, and as an increasingly scarce one at that. Finally, chapter 9 discusses how the poor have fared. It recognizes that poverty is multidimensional, that it is both a household attribute and an attribute of nations.