Sustainable Development Indicators and Environmental-Economic Accounting

The central subject of a policy for sustainable development is the coordination of the different sector policies with the objective of finding a balance between conflicting economical, ecological and social goals. The headline indicators for sustainable development itself are mainly a communication tool directed to the general public and the media. They are used for describing important problems under a sustainability perspective and they serve as an instrument for controlling general performance of political measures. But more detailed data are required for the analysis of the underlying mechanisms and reasons for change of the indicator values as well as for the formulation of measures and the assessment of the effects of these measures. Therefore, the individual indicators should be consistently embedded into an underlying database from which they can an be derived by aggregation. Further, the underlying data for the individual indicators should be part of a comprehensive framework that ideally integrates all relevant topics, in order to take account of the interdependencies between the different indicators. The accounting system with its three principle parts, the National Accounts (SNA) and the satellite systems Environmental-Economic Accounting (EEA) and the Socioeconomic Accounting (SEA) provides an ideal framework to meet these data requirements. In Germany a rather high proportion of economic and environmental indicators of the national Strategy on Sustainable Development are embedded into the accounting system. The potential of the accounting data for an integrated analysis of headline indicators of the German strategy on sustainable development is illustrated with selected examples. The paper describes the steps for integrating the indicator set and the accounting system.