Summary of the report Green headline indicators (SOU 1999:127)

Altogether, the Environmental Advisory Council proposes green headline indicators in twelve areas as a means of enabling the public and decision-makers to keep track of the transition to an ecologically sustainable society in Sweden.

What is the purpose of green headline indicators?
Society must work towards ecologically sustainable development. A great deal of work and commitment will be needed for this process of adjustment to succeed. Monitor systems of various kinds are necessary in order to measure the progress made in these efforts.

The monitoring of progress towards ecological sustainability is based on large quantities of statistics, which makes it difficult for non-specialists to understand the information without difficulty. A system consisting of a small number of green headline indicators provides the public and decision-makers with a simple and comprehensive way of following whether progress is being made and, if so, if the rate of progress is satisfactory. In other words, the purpose of green headline indicators is to complement the information that can be obtained elsewhere.

We hope that in time green headline indicators will have the same status as the established measures of inflation, growth and other economic indicators and that they will form a basis for political decision-making and also contribute to a livelier, broader and more objective debate about the ecologically sustainable development.

The indicators that we propose are intended to reflect domestic developments, but they should also make a useful contribution to the efforts being made to design internationally accepted indicators. The report also contains a brief discussion of the relationship between the green headline indicators and the environmental quality objectives that have been adopted by the Swedish Parliament.

What do green headline indicators tell us?
The green headline indicators proposed by the Environmental Advisory Council relate to twelve strategically important areas.

Three of the twelve indicators illustrate underlying causes. Pollutant emissions and environmental problems are largely caused by the massive requirement of materials, chemicals and energy. It is therefore important to reduce material and energy turnover and switch to materials, chemicals and energy sources that make less impact on health and the environment.

Five indicators are measures of emission levels or the state of the environment that relate to five serious environmental problems: the greenhouse effect, acidification, eutrophication, the quality of urban air and depletion of biological diversity.

To resolve environmental problems a large number of actors must begin to behave with greater environmental awareness. We must all take responsibility for reducing the impact on the environment. The remaining four indicators illustrate the pace at which various sectors, such as the public, consumers, enterprises, the public sector and schools, are moving towards an ecologically sustainable society. There are many possible measures in this area, and we could easily have chosen many more indicators, for example in the transport sector.

Read more about the indicators we have chosen focus on strategic sectors of society and significant factors in the transition process.

To read pdf format, get Adobe Acrobat Reader free of charge.