AGGREGATION AND INDICES

The word "indicator" comes from the Latin verb 'indicare' meaning to disclose or to point out. Indicators focus and condense information about complex issues for decision-making, management, monitoring and reporting purposes. Indicators will provide a signal to an issue of greater importance or make more evident a trend or phenomenon that is not immediately detectable. In short, indicators quantify and simplify phenomena to help us understand complex situations. Although indicators may be aggregates of raw and processed data, they can also be further aggregated themselves to form complex indices. High-level decision-makers dealing with sustainable development issues, routinely call for a manageable number of indices that are easy to understand and use in decision-making.

Globally, a number of indexes exist. These range from the Ecological Footprint, the Barometer of Sustainability, the Dashboard of Sustainability, the Human Development Index, the Environmental Sustainability Index to the Water Poverty Index, to name a few. For quick reference to a number of these websites, see the links page. An internal research project is investigating ways and means to aggregate environmental indicators from the national core set, in combination with other available national indicators, into meaningful indices that will support high-level decision making.