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• Part 6

• Infrastructure Development

• Infrastructure Stocktake

• Infrastructure Audit
• Sustainable Development
• Linkages
• A Policy Framework
• Stocktake Reportback
• Media Statements

• 6.1 Indicators and the Government's Sustainability Principles
• 6.2 Collecting Social and Environmental Data
• 6.3 Indicators and Infrastructure

6.1 Indicators and the Government's Sustainability Principles

The broader project to conduct a stocktake of New Zealand's infrastructure includes a separate report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that provides an audit of infrastructure, based on a comprehensive set of indicators. Given the existence of that analysis, and the risk of duplicating its commentary on indicators, our purpose here is to focus on the sustainable development dimension. We therefore set out what we see as the key issues for development of indicators to enable them to illuminate infrastructure sectors' contribution to (and impact on) sustainable development.

Indicators have been called "executive summaries of complex realities" (Jesinghaus, 1999). The purpose of indicators is to convey clear and simple messages about a topic to its intended audience. The challenge is to make these messages pithy as well as accurate. Although indicators are powerful tools for decision-making, they can never tell the whole truth. Indicators are useful for organising certain sorts of information, especially quantitative information, but much relevant information does not lend itself to this type of treatment and can only be assessed in a qualitative way. Available quantitative indicators should therefore always be considered together with qualitative information. In particular, indicators point us towards issues that require further investigation, rather than providing the summary answers.

The use of indicators is an important element in the implementation of the Government's "principles for sustainable development for policy and decision making" (Section 1.3 above). Two of these principles call for "using the best information to support decision-making" and "encouraging transparent and participatory processes." This means we must develop indicators for two distinct groups with different information requirements:

• Policy and decision makers: this group of users need information that allows them to make complex issues more tractable without getting lost in detail.
• Public at large: the lay public needs information in order to participate meaningfully in an open, participatory and democratic society.

Indicators must therefore be appropriate to their target audience. Indicators aimed at decision makers will be more specific and cover a greater number of aspects than those aimed at the general public, who will be more interested in a few, more generic indicators.

Two other principles among the Government's sustainable development principles give rise to particular types of indicators:

• Progress with decoupling environmental pressure from economic development can be demonstrated by so-called decoupling indicators, which describe a change in environmental pressure (e.g. pollutant emission) compared to a change in driving force (e.g. GDP, energy production or population). Use of undeveloped land for housing development, in relation to total number of households, is an example of a decoupling indicator used in the UK (Figure 6.1) with both environmental and social implications. From a policy perspective, decoupling indicators are attractive because they are apt to change over short time periods under the influence of environmental or economic policy. Decoupling indicators show us changes over time in the relationship between environmental or social pressure and development, but not absolute values and do not tell us anything about the capacity of the environment or society to sustain those pressures in the long run.

Figure 6.1: Example of a Decoupling Indicator

Source: DEFRA/DTI (2003a)

• Respect for environmental limits can be demonstrated by policy performance indicators, which show compliance with environmental quality standards (e.g. urban ambient air quality guidelines) or emission/discharge limits in resource consents or bylaws (e.g. maximum concentrations of nitrogen in sewage effluent). An example of a performance indicator is the percentage of time that a thermal power station has complied with consent conditions relating to the maximum temperature of its cooling water discharged into a river. Note that policy performance indicators are aimed at both the general public and decision-makers because they make the latter more accountable to their constituencies.

Other principles set out in the Programme of Action are equally important, but in general are less amenable to assessment through the use of indicators. In particular, it is difficult to capture in indicators two fundamental aspects of sustainable development - its long-term (intergenerational) nature, and its holistic nature.

6.2 Collecting Social and Environmental Data

Defining appropriate indicators must also take account of the availability of good quality, up-to-date data. While economic and some social data have been collected for many years, the same is not true for environmental data and data on some social issues (e.g. inequalities in health).³⁰⁷ Moreover, the perspective of sustainable development has given rise to new questions that had not been asked before and about which no information has been collected as yet. The experience of the Environmental Performance Indicators Programme of the Ministry for the Environment shows how difficult and expensive it is to create and maintain new databases. The examples of indicators suggested in this report should therefore be read as suggesting the sort of menu of potential indicators that might be chosen from, rather than as firm recommendations. The actual choice of indicators should be made with a view to institutional context, specific policy objectives and the cost of data collection, whether once-off or long-term.

6.3 Indicators and Infrastructure

The analysis in the foregoing sections has brought out many policy issues of relevance to sustainable development in an infrastructure context. Indicators should be framed so they directly address these issues and can help answer concrete policy questions, especially with respect to performance. For instance, the "Desired Outcome" under the physical environment theme of the Social Report (Ministry of Social Development, 2003) proposes that the natural and built environment in which people live should be clean, healthy, and beautiful. The report then uses an infrastructure indicator - the proportion of the population served with water that meets drinking water standards - to highlight performance in terms of one of the aspects of the desired outcome. The report also comments on regional differences in performance and compares the situation New Zealand with that in other developed countries. Other infrastructure-related indicators used in the report concern road casualties and telephone and Internet access in the home.

It is not always possible to find quantitative indicators of the economic, social, cultural and environmental contribution of infrastructure. In such cases, it may be feasible to find indicators of contributions to sustainable development in a qualitative sense, as well as to monitor areas in which infrastructure is imposing adverse impacts.

One area of difficulty for indicators is in capturing the two key policy framework elements identified above (Part 2) which link infrastructure to sustainability. These two elements are first, comprehensively identifying externalities associated with potential infrastructure provision, and integrating externalities into policy; and second, working to build awareness of sustainable development, as a relevant high-level goal (a "quadruple bottom line"), requiring positive behaviour change (e.g. monitoring and reporting) and other adjustments of social norms. Again, these are more likely to be captured, if imperfectly, by qualitative rather than quantitative indicators.

In order to use indicators to assess the contribution of infrastructure to sustainable development, then, we would expect to see indicator development working towards answering the following questions

The table below provides a specific example drawn from the water sector. It repeats some of the policy questions posed in Part 3 of this report and suggests indicators that will elucidate the debate around these questions. We reiterate that indicators are just one tool among others: they do not provide all the answers and must always be interpreted in context. Also, Table 6.1 makes it clear that not all questions lend themselves well to the use of indicators. An example of the use of graphical indicators by an Australian water utility is provided in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2: Examples of Indicators Used by Sydney Water

Source: Sydney Water Ecologically Sustainable Development Indicators, 2001

³⁰⁷The Social Report (Ministry of Social Development, 2003) provides an update of social indicators.