Abstract
This paper presents an overview of environmental indexes and indicators. A short definition of some indicators is considered and a new environmental performance framework is proposed in close relation to environmental performance index (EPI). The aim is to explore the relation between indicators and as well as to find the most suited index that could gear environmental aspects towards SD. New Environmental Performance scores (i.e. new aggregate scores (NAS) according to the proposed framework) of some selected countries were used for comparison purpose and the poor performance in some policy categories was analyzed in a time series data contextually. Sri Lanka is considered as a case study. The result of the analysis shows that Sri Lanka’s performance in air pollution category and environmental burden on diseases are poor. To conclude, the environmental performance category analysis shows that the growing demand on scarce resources and pollution play an important role in environmental stress. The use of fossil fuel is the major contributor to CO2 emission in Sri Lanka. The increasing trend of CO2 emission contributes to the environmental burden of diseases and air pollution in Sri Lanka.
Highlights
1.1 Overview of indexes and indicatorsIndicators express a wider image than the underlying statistics imply
Index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW) is based on final consumption and related to national accounts and later modified to accommodate welfare effects which are not measured by Gross domestic product (GDP) and private consumption, this later renamed as genuine progress index (GPI) (Jonathan et al, 2008)
Except Senegal all most all other countries have done better in water pollution category. This is due to the difficulty in access to water sanitation and accesses to drinking water in Senegal (Environmental performance Index, Report, 2010)
Summary
1.1 Overview of indexes and indicatorsIndicators express a wider image than the underlying statistics imply. The indicators show different dimensions of SD such as economic, environmental, social and institutional. Happy Planet Index (HPI) measures real economic well-being (NEF, 2010). Non monetary indicators such as human development index (HDI) do not include environmental concerns whereas environmental sustainability index (ESI), sustainable development index (SDI), and welfare index (WI) cover environmental issues. Composite indices demonstrate caution for urgent actions and information in a concise manner and preferred by policy makers. Speaking both indicators and indices are not explicit in their goals and the selected indicators express the core goals. The complexity behind the SD makes it more difficult to measure directly unless it includes common monitory indicators that can be meaningfully valued using existing data
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