J. R. Statist. Soc.

A (1998)
161, Part 3, pp. 291^302

Sustainability indicators Ð integrating quality of life

and environmental protection

Roger Levett{
CAG Consultants, London, UK

[Read before The Royal Statistical Society at an Ordinary Discussion Meeting on `Alternatives to
economic statistics as indicators of national well-being' on Wednesday, January 14th, 1998, the
President, Professor R. N. Curnow, in the Chair ]

Summary. The struggle to ®nd and use indicators of sustainable development is intimately bound
up with the process of deciding what we mean by sustainable development and what we shall do
about it. In this ®eld at least, indicators are intrinsically and unavoidably normative and political.
The paper proposes an approach to indicators which re¯ects, and can further clarify and help to
achieve, an important aspect of sustainable development. The paper is written from a practical,
instrumental interest in indicators as a tool to put sustainable development principles into practice
in public policy. The author is not a statistician and makes no claim to technical expertise but
hopes that this `barefoot' practitioner perspective may be of some interest to the professionals.
The main argument is introduced by a discussion of some of the pitfalls and limitations of sus-
tainability indicators to date.
Keywords: Environmental limits; Indicators; Policy integration; Quality of life; Sustainability

1. Some clari®cations
1.1. `Fitness for purpose'
Everyone agrees that indicators should be
(a) policy relevant,
(b) resonant,
(c) scienti®cally valid and
(d) measurable (i.e. the necessary data are available).
The painful experience of the last few years has been that it is hard enough to ®nd indicators
with any two or three of these attributes. The `resonant' indicators developed by (for
example) the famous community-led `Sustainable Seattle' project or many UK `Local agenda
21' processes have had minimal e€ect on policy (for example see Brugmann (1997)); the
technical indicators developed by (for example) the Dutch government and the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ba‚e everyone else. And few data
are available for any of them.
This paper argues that instead of straining to produce a single de®nitive set of sustainable
development indicators we should take a more modest `®tness-for-purpose' approach: using
di€erent indicators sets for di€erent purposes. (Although, as will be argued in Section 1.3,
di€erent does not mean unconnected or inconsistent.)

{Address for correspondence: CAG Consultants, Antonia House, 262 Holloway Road, London, N7 6NE, UK.
E-mail: hq@cagconsult.co.uk

& 1998 Royal Statistical Society 0964±1998/98/161291

292 R. Levett

1.2. The need for context

Meaning comes from the patterns that indicators make with each other, just as a single word
or chord has little meaning without the rest of the sentence or musical passage. Here are three
examples where isolated sustainability indicators are highly ambiguous.
(a) Does a reduction in pedestrian and cyclist casualties mean that roads are becoming
safer, or that non-motorists are now too terri®ed even to try to use them?
(b) Does a reduction in the energy intensity of the UK economy, as reported in the ®rst
set of national sustainable development indicators (Department of the Environment,
1996), mean that we are dematerializing the economy Ð or just deindustrializing the
country, and importing instead of making goods whose energy intensity is unchanged,
but is now chalked up to another country's account?
(c) The celebrated Seattle indicator of air quality, whether a mountain can be seen across
the city, could be improved by moving polluting industry or power generation to the
other side of the mountain, or by applying energy-intensive end-of-pipe processes to
capture pollutants which must then be disposed of on land, or if poorer people with
more polluting cars are told that they cannot drive on certain days, or if any number of
other counter-productive or ambivalent ®xes are used.
Contextual information is needed to tell whether the apparent improvement in the
`headline' indicator is really good or bad news. This also guards against a second risk: that
giving too much emphasis to even a (potentially) good indicator in isolation can distort
policy. For example emphasizing hospital waiting lists in isolation has tempted hospitals to
`zero the clock' by reclassifying patients between teams or lists. Broader measures of how
quickly patients received treatment would remove the temptation.

1.3. Integrating the few and the many

A handful of resonant headline indicators of sustainable development are ®ne Ð provided
that we also collect and make available publicly enough relevant contextual and supporting
material to allow anyone interested to judge whether the headline indicators actually mean
what they appear (or purport, or are claimed by politicians) to mean.
We can think of resonant indicators as the mountain peaks visible above a layer of cloud,
each buttressed and supported by a `pyramid' of more technical indicators. This model can
explain how what are sometimes seen as two completely di€erent (and competing) kinds of
indicator are in fact connected (Fig. 1).
Therefore we should not ask `how many indicators should there be in the national set?'
as if there can be a single right answer. Instead we should ask ®rst `what sort of things do
we need to measure to form a sensible picture of sustainable development?', and then `which
combinations and interpretations of these measurements need to be published in which ways
to meet the di€erent needs of various user groups?'.
Answering both these questions of course requires a major input of professional statistical
expertise. But it also raises non-technical questions which are the focus of this paper.

2. Indicators are value laden

2.1. The process of choosing indicators
The Minister of State for the Environment, Michael Meacher, has very wisely recognized that
we need a handful of headline indicators of sustainable development to set alongside other
 Sustainability Indicators 293

Resonant indicators

Technical indicators

Fig. 1. Resonant and technical indicators

established indicators if we are to achieve an e€ective policy. The conclusion of the previous
section Ð that such isolated `peaks' need not be ambiguous provided that we `buttress' them
with supporting subsidiary indicators Ð is therefore useful. However, this part of the paper
argues that producing these headline indicators cannot be a tidy stepwise process of deciding
what we mean by sustainable development and then choosing suitable indicators to en-
capsulate it. Instead, developing policies and indicators go hand in hand.

2.2. Indicators embody policy objectives

One of the reasons why school league tables caused an outcry was that, by starkly and
glaringly revealing the view that a `good' school was simply a school that achieved many
examination passes, they provoked many people to examine and make explicit Ð ®rst to
themselves, then in public protests Ð why they disagreed with this view, and what else makes
a good school Ð e.g. that it civilizes and socializes as well as crams, and that it expands the
capabilities and horizons of whatever children happen to go to it, rather than achieving good
results by preselecting children who are likely to achieve them.
These views call forth di€erent indicators Ð e.g. measures of participation in collective
activities, or incidence of antisocial behaviours and measuring the school's `value added' Ð
the di€erence that it makes to the children who enter it Ð rather than absolute outputs. These
are much more dicult to measure than examination results and raise more technical
diculties for statisticians. But the search for better indicators is not only a technical
problem. It is also a stimulus to more thinking about precisely what it is that we value.

2.3. Indicators and transport policy objectives

The same process is happening in transport policy. The Government's continued reporting of
increases in measures such as road miles, car ownership and trac as if they were unalloyed
progress was an important factor in provoking the `alternative' view of transport which is now
rapidly taking over. This led ®rst to an interest in other `output' measures such as lengths of
cycle track or bus routes, but then in turn to recognition that access to amenities should be the
aim of policy, while mobility is only one of many possible means to achieve it.
The search is now on for ways to measure access. In their second `Green audit' Lancashire
County Council (1997) measured access in terms of having ®ve basic services Ð a primary
school, post-oce, food shop, bus-stop and doctor's surgery Ð within 1 km of home. This
de®nition has the virtue of being easy to explain and understand, and (with a geographical
information system) measured exactly.
294 R. Levett

But it provokes further questions. What range of food is available at the local shop, and is
it as cheap and fresh as at the superstore 15 km away? How good is the service from the bus-
stop? How many busy main roads does a partially sighted pensioner have to cross to reach
the post-oce or food shop? How much time does it take a household to make its usual
pattern of trips to food shops, workplaces, schools and so on each week? How much longer
does it take without a car? For how many households does the cost of reaching recreations,
entertainments and social facilities exceed a certain proportion of disposable income Ð is
there a class of `transport poor' who su€er the same sort of exclusion as the `fuel poor'?
Distance, time, cost and availability of services may all matter for accessibility, and there is
no one obvious way to weight and combine them. Capturing and re¯ecting these various
concerns adequately in indicators that are technically robust, not too complicated to be
comprehensible and not prohibitively expensive to measure is a considerable professional
challenge. But this does not mean that access is meaningless or impossible to measure. Instead
it means that we already have a general notion of what we mean by accessibility (including,
crucially, that it is not the same as mobility), but we shall discover more sharply and
speci®cally what we mean by it Ð and which aspects we are most concerned about Ð through
the process of inventing, trying, criticizing, discarding and re®ning possible indicators of it.
These examples show that developing indicators is intrinsically a dialectical rather than a
deductive process. The struggle to frame measures leads us to a better understanding of what
we are concerned about. Grappling with the question `how can we tell whether it is growing
better or worse?' both forces and helps us to clarify what we think `it' is. Indicators are not
neutral technical entities: they are inescapably value laden. They are inputs to policy as well
as consequences of it.

2.4. Indicator sets can articulate a world view

If this is true in speci®c policy areas like education and transport, it is even more so of
sustainable development, a new and unfamiliar topic where too much vague inspirational
rhetoric has fostered continuing uncertainty (and allowed deliberate misunderstanding)
about what it means in practice. Indicators have a crucial role to play in clarifying and
demystifying it.
Di€erent approaches to sustainability indicators re¯ect di€erent world views. The famous
Seattle approach and the UK Local Government Management Board project which copied it
imply that the core of sustainability is how people feel about their surroundings and their
way of life. The Dutch or OECD approach, structured around connecting environmental
states with human pressures and policy responses to them, emphasizes technical eco-eciency.
These di€erent approaches need to be seen (just like the distinction between resonant and
technical which they partly parallel) as di€erent fragments of a bigger picture that needs the
connecting parts ®lled in, rather than competing or con¯icting.
Some much remarked features of the ®rst UK set of indicators were accurate pointers to
the Conservative Government's ideological stance on sustainable development:
(a) the absence of the social dimension re¯ected the view most memorably expressed in
Mrs Thatcher's notorious remark `there is no such thing as society';
(b) the reporting of many environmental `state' and `pressure' variables without any
target, threshold, limit or other `comparison' values re¯ected a rejection of the idea
that environmental capacities or limits should constrain policy;
(c) the use of ratios of environmental damage to economic output implied (by default) that
economic output was a satisfactory proxy for quality of life.
 Sustainability Indicators 295

These indicators have (as intended) elicited extensive comment and debate. This is now
informing development of the next set of indicators. But it should also inform the Labour
Government's development of its policies and views of sustainable development. The next
part of this paper discusses an important strand of this: the relationship between economic,
environmental and social aims in sustainable development more broadly.

2.5. Sustainability: `three-ring circus' or `Russian dolls'?

Many discussions of sustainability Ð including Custance and Hillier (1998) Ð invoke the idea
that sustainable development is about the intersection of social, environmental and economic
goals (Fig. 2).
This model Ð we could call it the `three-ring circus' Ð is a great advance on treating social
goals as dependent on or identical with economic goals, and environmental outcomes as
residuals Ð or simply ignoring these two realms altogether. But it does not go suciently far,
for two reasons. First, the environment is a precondition for the other two. Without the
planet's basic environmental life-support systems there can be no economy or society.
Secondly, `the economy' is not an end in itself or a force of nature. It is a social construct. It
only works as it does because human societies have created the institutions and inculcated the
assumptions, expectations and behaviours which make it so. The only reason for keeping it
thus and not otherwise is if we think that it will be good at meeting our needs. So the picture
is really `Russian dolls' (Fig. 3).
This says that sustainability is about ensuring that human society lives within the
environment's limits Ð and that the economy meets society's needs. This more radical view is
implicit in much of the UK local government literature on sustainable development (such as
Local Government Management Board (1993, 1995)) and even some European Union
material (e.g. European Expert Group on the Urban Environment (1996)) and explicit in
several of the most important recent non-government organization statements (including
Jacobs (1996) and McLaren et al. (1997)).

3. Indicators in the Russian doll model

3.1. Implications for national sustainable development indicators
In the Russian doll model, the key questions for indicators are as follows.
(a) Are we living within environmental limits?
(b) Are we achieving a good quality of life?

Environment Economy

Society

Fig. 2. Conventional `three-ring circus' model of sustainability

296 R. Levett

Environment

Society

Economy

Fig. 3. (Proposed) Russian dolls model of sustainability

Measuring either of these presents big practical and theoretical diculties. The next sections
touch brie¯y on these; either deserves a book to itself.

3.2. Measuring environmental limits

The `environmental limits' which seem conceptually most clear cut Ð e.g. the atmosphere's
ability to assimilate greenhouse gases or depletion of non-renewable resources Ð turn out to
be the most dicult to put numbers to because of (for example) the notorious complexity
and unpredictability of the climate system. Conversely, the environmental limits which can
most easily be measured, such as a local habitat's ability to tolerate pollution or resource
extraction without some dramatic `step' change Ð do not so obviously and unambiguously
deserve to be treated as absolute constraints on policy. As Jacobs (1997) has argued, even
where the science of environmental limits is clear, its interpretation and application in policy
are unavoidably political and judgmental. Moreover many invocations of environmental
limits Ð for example in resisting new housing developments Ð are not really about the
environment's capacity but about the preferences of people who are already suciently lucky
to live in desirable areas.
However, none of this invalidates the basic insight that the earth does not have an
unlimited capacity to absorb human impacts, and we would be prudent to understand the
limits as well as we can and to direct policy to staying within them. Two recent pieces of work
greatly increase our ability to do so. The ®rst is the work of Friends of the Earth on
`environmental space', recently published in their monumental report Tomorrow's World
(McLaren et al., 1997). This estimates the maximum sustainable rates of consumption of
resources such as energy, land, wood, metals, minerals and chemicals, divides this between
countries on the basis of equal per capita shares and compares this `sustainable entitlement'
with each country's actual consumption.
The second is the `environmental footprint' (Wackernagel and Rees, 1995). This goes a step
further, by trying to bring all ecological impacts down to a single common measure Ð the
area of productive land needed to grow the necessary raw materials (or renewable substitutes
for them) and/or to assimilate the relevant wastes. (The `land equivalent' of fossil fuel
burning, for example, is the area needed to grow enough biomass crop to replace the fossil
fuel Ð or to mop up the carbon dioxide released burning it: the two should come to the same
thing.)
Both these methods raise further questions Ð about, for example, the basis for allocating
`fair shares', the treatment of the historical accident of di€erent national population densities
and endowments of land and resources, and in what sense environmental `shares' should be
 Sustainability Indicators 297

`tradable'. (See for example Levett (1998).) It is not yet clear that all impacts can be sensibly
converted into land footprint terms. But by avoiding this problem `environmental space' does
not o€er a single measure of progress towards or away from environmental sustainability.
Both methods already provide compelling evidence that countries like the UK are
exceeding prudent levels of resource consumption severalfold rather than by the tens of
percentage points which mainstream policy discusses. But both footprinting and environ-
mental space are held up by poor, inconsistent and missing data, leading to huge error bars.
Unlike many of the problems of sustainability indicators this problem is soluble simply by a
suciently large helping of old-fashioned statistical elbow-grease. One of the most useful
contributions that the Government could make is to pay for this to consolidate and re®ne the
pioneering work that has so far been done on a relative shoestring by academics and
campaigning organizations.

3.3. Measuring quality of life

Quality of life is subjective. We can often ®nd objectively measurable proxies for aspects of
it, as the discussions above of both schools performance and access show. And preferences
can sometimes be empirically established through observing behaviour. For example, recent
research at the University of the West of England found that most people will use whichever
children's play area is nearest to their home but will loyally keep going to the same dentist
even after moving miles away. This suggests that having children's play areas within walking
distance of family homes does more for sustainable access (and should have more weight in
any indicator of it) than having a dentist on every street corner. But this only provides a clue
to one part of the access question.
But how much weight should be given to each factor Ð and then how much weight should
be put on access as against other aspects of quality of life Ð cannot be settled empirically.
`Objective' proxies are only valid in so far as they re¯ect people's preferences and values. The
subjectivity is only pushed one step back.
These complications increase the attractions of taking some objectively measurable
economic indicator as a proxy for well-being. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is
often used in this way. Statisticians and economists will rightly protest that GDP is not a
measure of welfare. But mainstream politicians use it as if it were. There is no other possible
explanation for the headline reporting and political party bickering about GDP growth rates,
or justi®cation for the continued promotion of economic growth as a policy objective.
There is also no other justi®cation for the handful of indicators in the ®rst UK national set
which plot environmental evils such as energy consumption against GDP over time and
present the decline in the energy intensity of GDP as good news. Unless GDP growth is
believed to tell us something signi®cant about quality of life, however imperfectly and
indirectly, this sort of ratio has no more meaning than plotting energy consumption against
the average shoe size of Cabinet Ministers.
In any case one of the main questions at issue in the debate about sustainable development
is how far Ð and what kinds of Ð economic activity contribute to welfare. (See for example
Jacobs (1996) and Daly and Cobb (1990).) It would therefore be stultifyingly circular for
sustainable development indicators to measure quality of life in terms of some aggregate
measure of economic activity. And as soon as we try to modify GDP to bring it closer to
some conception of welfare Ð for example in the index of sustainable economic welfare
(ISEW) (Jackson and Marks, 1994) we are back to subjectivity in deciding which things need
to be added to and subtracted from GDP, and how they should be measured and weighted
298 R. Levett

(which does not detract from the immense educational and polemical value of the ISEW and
other alternative indices in making people question the use of GDP as a measure of welfare
and recognize it as illicit and ideologically loaded!).
For the same reason, economic and quasi-economic methods of ascertaining preferences
such as `contingent valuation' are ruled out since they rely on exactly the assumptions that
quality of life can be adequately captured through aggregating individual `what is it worth to
me?' bids which the `communitarian' strand of sustainability thought rejects.
So there is no escape from subjectivity. If we are trying to measure quality of life, we must
(in some sense, and at some stage) ask the people concerned what they think it is. The new
consultation toolkit of `Local agenda 21' Ð focus groups, citizens' juries, `future search' or
`syntegrity' techniques, methods which seek to build consensus through deliberative group
process Ð may help. However, we are probably even further from a satisfactory measurement
of quality of life than we are with environmental limits.

3.4. Beyond `balance': measuring integration

In the Russian doll model, development is sustainable if it provides a good quality of life and
stays within environmental limits. Neither is optional: we must achieve both together, rather
than one at the expense of the other. Sustainable development therefore must be about
reconciling them with each other rather than trading one against the other. The concept of
`balance', entrenched in the planning system and frequently invoked in the debate about
sustainable development, apparently so mature, judicious, reasonable and even-handed, is in
fact a betrayal of what sustainability is about and an obstacle to its achievement.
Balance infects policy-making with defeatism. For example, if we set out to balance the
needs of people for warm homes against the environmental imperative to reduce the use
of fossil fuels, we cannot possibly win: we have to choose between global warming and
neighbours freezing. But if instead we frame the question in terms of reconciling the two
requirements Ð how can we keep people comfortable in their homes and use less fossil
fuel? Ð di€erent kinds of solutions immediately suggest themselves: better insulation and
draught proo®ng; more energy-ecient appliances; passive solar design; renewable energy
sources.
All these solutions help us to improve the `rate of exchange' between the e€ects on the
climate of fossil energy consumption at one end and people comfortable in their homes at the
other. We can generalize this insight to think of the relationship between these two things as a
chain of ratios or conversion rates, each measuring one step in the overall environmental cost
of social welfare, and each implying a di€erent set of possible improvement actions (Table 1).
Assembling information in this framework would help to show (for example) the follow-
ing.
(a) Britain's vaunted success in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide has been achieved
largely by substituting gas for coal (step 1) Ð that is as a lucky side-e€ect of structu-
ral change in the energy supply industry driven by commercial not environmental
considerations.
(b) Compared with this, the e€ects of conscious `green energy' measures have been small.
This leaves enormous potential. But realizing it will require much more conscious and
systematic interventions.
(c) Some steps o€er much more potential than others. Improving the thermal eciency of
an old power-station by one or two percentage points requires heroic engineering;
 Sustainability Indicators 299
Table 1. Conversion rates for sustainability in domestic energy

Ratio Examples of improvement actions

Greenhouse emissions from domestic energy use

1 Carbon dioxide intensity of energy
from fossil fuels
2 Fossil fuel intensity of energy supply
3 Thermal eciency of conversion of
fossil fuel to delivered energy
4 Eciency of conversion of delivered
energy into energy services for the
householder
5 Thermal eciency of housing
6 Reduced consumer waste
7 Thermal eciency of life styles
Thermal comfort
Shift from coal to gas (which releases less carbon
dioxide per unit of heat because of the chemistry)
Develop renewable energy sources
Heat recovery in power-stations
Combined cycle
Combined heat and power
Ecient appliances
Neighbourhood level combined heat and power
Insulation, draught proo®ng
Do not heat and light empty rooms
Warmer clothing, lower temperatures, larger
households, together in rooms more

replacing the power-station with smaller ones that can recover and use the waste heat
doubles thermal eciency.
(d) By concentrating on only parts of the chain, current performance measures distort
policy. For example the existence of a reliable standardized method to measure the
physical thermal eciency of individual buildings has led to its widespread use as a
performance measure. This encourages emphasis on ®tting widgets to houses and ¯ats,
to the detriment of changing the behaviour of householders and installing neigh-
bourhood level combined heat and power, which can often save more energy at less
cost but are invisible in terms of the indicator. (This is like the hospital waiting lists
problem described earlier.)
(e) Some of the interventions which most preoccupy policy makers at present are sterile in
sustainability terms. For example raising or lowering the price of household energy
simply tilts the seesaw to favour either the environment or comfort at the expense of
the other. Price manipulation can be a powerful tool for sustainability Ð but it depends
on what else is done with it.
(f ) Improvements in several of the ratios can simply be added up. For example a 20%
reduction in the energy needed to keep houses warm (step 5) and a 10% increase in
renewable generation would achieve a 30% reduction in burning fossil fuel. Even
though some reduce each other's e€ect (for example, the more eciently electricity is
generated in the ®rst place, the less greenhouse bene®t each low energy light achieves),
surprisingly large overall improvements could be built up from a systematic im-
plementation of individually modest and achievable improvements along the chain.
All these are instances of the general point that, by letting us see both the separate
components of green energy and how they relate overall, indicators of this form could help us
to make intelligent, integrated decisions about energy policy. Perhaps we could save more
energy in the home by reviving a taste for living in large families in terraced houses and
singing together round the living-room piano on winter evenings Ð what we could call the
J. B. Priestley model of sustainability Ð than through the technical ®xes which currently
preoccupy policy. The numbers could tell us.
300 R. Levett

3.5. Why so easy?

Given the diculties (sketched above) in measuring environmental limits or quality of life,
it may seem surprising that measuring their reconciliation is not more dicult but
straightforward to the point of banality Ð indeed largely a matter of assembling in a co-
ordinated way data of kinds that we already have or could collect without diculty. Where
has all the mystique of sustainable development indicators gone? Can it really be as
straightforward as this? Where is the catch?
There are three catches, but they are all benign. The ®rst is that the chain sketched above
obviously only deals with a small slice of sustainability. Thermal comfort is only one
component of quality of life. But, for this reason, it should be easier to de®ne thermal
comfort operationally than quality of life in the broader sense. Indeed the fuel poverty lobby
has already done good work on one important aspect, the discomfort, debilitation and illness
caused by lack of a€ordable warmth. So long as thermal comfort is the main component of
quality of life which is a€ected by domestic fossil fuel use, the chain will be a useful selection
and ordering of information rather than a distorting oversimpli®cation. More generally
this will be the case wherever both the environmental and quality-of-life ends of a chain are
measurable, clearly important for sustainability and strongly linked to each other through
human activities.
This ®rst catch is benign because we are currently at such a rudimentary stage that it will be
easy to ®nd chains that meet these criteria. A handful of them could enable us to understand
several of the biggest sustainability questions that are facing us (Table 2).
The model can become much more subtle and comprehensive. Many chains would cross-
connect with others. For example energy in buildings would be related to land use and
quality of the built environment. One can imagine a web of interconnected coecients linking
environmental and social variables and enabling the sustainability e€ectiveness of di€erent
potential policy interventions to be modelled together. To what level of detail it will be worth
actually constructing this web is a question that we can answer incrementally as policy moves
on. But even as an imagined entity it o€ers a way to think about sustainability policy choice.
Pro-sustainability actions would be those which signi®cantly improved at least one
coecient while not signi®cantly worsening any others. Some actions would improve more
di€erent coecients than others. For example improving the fuel consumption of car engines
would be good for reducing global warming but would do nothing for any of the other `cross-
chains' of car use, about congestion, danger, unlivable streets, inequity, social exclusion,

Table 2. Example of conversion rates for sustainability

Environmental limit Energy in transport Land effects of food Resource intensity of

consumption

Intermediate steps (sum- Technical fuel eciency of Soil degradation Renewable : non-renewable
marized) vehicles ratio (e.g. timber : plastic)
Vehicle occupancy rates Fossil fuel±synthetic fertili- Manufacturing eco-
zer intensity of crops eciency
Modal split (car±public Meat proportion of diet± Durability, repair, reuse,
transport±non- feed intensity of animal recycling rates
motorized) rearing
Local accessibility of Food waste in preparation Multifunction versus
amenities proliferation
Food waste at home Voluntary simplicity
Quality-of-life-component Access Good food Services from consumption
 Sustainability Indicators 301

community severance, reduction in healthy exercise, town centre erosion and so on. (Indeed
improved fuel consumption could make these other problems worse by reducing the cost of
motoring unless it was combined with corrective measures such as higher fuel taxes.) By
contrast an action nearer to the social end of the chain, reducing the need to travel by car,
would improve all of these. `Broad spectrum' or `integrative' actions like this hold the key
to a painless transition towards sustainability. The indicators model proposed can help to
identify them.
The second catch is that this model does not measure sustainability itself, but only whether
we are moving towards or away from it. Given that the current priority is to reverse trends
away from sustainability, this seems a tolerable limitation at present, provided that we can be
con®dent that the model does always point us in the right direction. As we progressively pick
o€ the simplest and most unambiguously bene®cial integrative actions, this will become more
dicult to prove. But this is a problem to dream of.
Even at the current pioneer stage, the kinds of indicators suggested could connect policy
aspirations more ®rmly with organizational practice by providing a basis for cascading
national and international sustainability targets down to local levels and latching them into
objectives for environmental management systems, `best practice' bench-marks and such like.
The third catch is that this model has so far ignored the economy. In one sense this is its
great strength. By taking each chain to a quality-of-life end point, it avoids the risk inherent
in traditional eco-eciency measures, such as those comparing environmental consumption
with GDP, of sanitizing and sanctioning economic activities which do not contribute to
welfare and should instead be abolished. In this model `the economy' ceases to be the altar on
which we devoutly sacri®ce both human welfare and environmental security and instead
becomes the rather frustrating and obstructive maze that we must traverse to connect them.
The catch is benign because excluding the economy as an end makes the indicators model
better able to understand and manage it as a means, by showing how any proposed econ-
omic instruments Ð taxes, charges, subsidies and so on Ð would a€ect the integration of
environmental limits and quality-of-life components, undistracted by spurious or question-
able economic proxies for these. The proposed indicators web would probably reveal
ecological tax reform Ð shifting taxation from social desirables such as employment to
environmental evils such as energy use, pollution and waste Ð as potentially one of the
biggest integrative actions of all. At a more microlevel, it would allow the sustainability
e€ects of di€erent possible actions to be compared. Adding information about the cost of
those actions would provide a basis for assessing sustainability cost-e€ectiveness, and making
intelligent decisions about priorities.

4. Conclusion
This paper has aimed both to argue that the development of sustainability indicators and
policy are intimately intertwined and to exhibit the dialectical process in action, through the
move from the three-ring circus to the Russian doll model of sustainability.

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