BACKGROUND

How did South Africa get involved in using indicators?

The United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development (UNCSD), was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED, and to monitor and report on implementation of the UNCED agreements at the local, national, regional and international levels. The UNCSD approved the Programme of Work on Indicators of Sustainable Development in 1995. The main objective of the Work Programme was to make indicators of sustainable development accessible to decision-makers at the national level, by defining them, elucidating their methodologies and providing training and other capacity building activities. As part of the implementation of the Work Programme, a working list of 134 indicators and related methodology sheets were developed and distributed for voluntary testing worldwide. The South African national Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) became involved with indicators of sustainability in February 1996, when co-operation with the UNCSD's indicator testing process commenced. The process started early in 1997, and DEAT was involved in testing the 134 indicators of sustainability (55 of these were environmental indicators), and reporting to the UNCSD on the relevance and potential applicability in South Africa (see Resources).

In October 1999, DEAT launched the first National State of the Environment (SOE) report on the Internet for South Africa, together with State of the Environment reports for four South African cities: Cape Town; Durban; Johannesburg and Pretoria. Since then numerous city and provincial level State of the Environment reports have been produced as well as several sector-specific initiatives such as the State of Rivers report, the State of Human Settlements report, the State of Estuaries report and the State of the Coast report.

Recent years have shown increasing numbers of indicator initiatives in South Africa. Examples of these include the River Health Programme, the South African Integrated Spatial Information System programme, the Human Rights Commission indicators and the programme run by Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) to develop indicators for sustainable forest management. In many cases specific indicators are required for specific purposes, however a fragmented approach to indicator establishment, monitoring and data collection may result in duplication of effort or omission of critical components. It is therefore important to establish a core set of environmental indicators and a coordinated indicator implementation strategy.