1. ouest Editorial
Environmental Indicators:An Integral Tool for the Future
of Environmental Management
James R. Bernard, Project Manager
State Environmental Goals and Indicators Project
Introduction
Environmental indicators - the direct or indirect measures of environmental quality that can be used to assess conditions
and trends in the environment's ability to support human and ecological health - are becoming essential and integral tools in
environmental management.
The State Environmental Goals and Indicators Project has identified over 2,000 environmental indicator practitioners
representing over 200 different project at the federal, state, regional, place-based/ecosystem, estuary, and coastal levels. Nongov-
ernmental organizations and corporations are also using environmental indicators in annual reports.
Twenty-seven states are undertaking an environmental indicator project or process; 12 states having completed state of the
environment reports. A recent survey of75 state environmental management agencies by the Project found that 71 percent of the
respondents were involved in environmental status and trends reporting.
These statistics represent more than a short-lived phenomenon. The use of environmental indicators is becoming a funda-
mental component of environmental management.
Yet, environmental indicators are not a new concept. In fact, a great deal of thinking about environmental indicators and
aggregated groups of indicators, or environmental indices, was undertaken in the early 1970s, but subsequently set aside.
How did we move away from measuring the environment
and - more specifically- why did we lose sight of environmen-
tal indicators?A perspective that acknowledged the
interconnectednessof humans and environmental systems, along
with the ideathat the whole was greaterthan the sum of the parts,
was gradually replaced by a stream of single-medium, single-issue,
prescriptive environmental laws and associatedregulations.
Broadly-trainedenvironmental professionalswent to work in
government agencies or in corporations and were instructedto
service specific permitting functions. At the same time, nongovern-
mental organizations struggled to keep up with a rapidly growing
and hierarchical environmental bureaucracy.
Program efficiency was measured on paper in numbers of
permits issued, compliance and enforcement actions taken,
instead of by what was actually happening in the environment.
The environmental monitoring data embedded within the
permitting process was obscured by data management systems
that only grudgingly yield information that could be used in
characterizing overall environmental conditions.
An institutional culture characterized by constrained
single-medium programming accompanied by jurisdictional
turf fights and lack of communication symbolized the discon-
nection of environmental professionals from the environment.
There was a steady profusion of acronyms for environmental
programs that tended to obscured the environmental issues
themselves and made them more arcane and inaccessible to
decisionmakers and the public.
Environmental management practitioners were not able
to solve the conundrums of the difference between natural
resource management and environmental protection; the
difference between reactive versus proactive approaches to
solving problems; and the difference between regulatory and
other, softer approaches to government intervention.
In contrast, today, there are a number of factors -laws,
policy initiatives, agreements - that are driving the need for
26
more and better environmental information for accountability
and decisionmaking.
* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
National Environmental Goals Project will soon release
Environmental Goals for America with Milestones for 2005,
which will suggest long-range goals and propose environmen-
tal progress indicators with ten-year target levels. This project
will provide environmental indicators and data that will be
used to track results covering the major environmental issues
with which USEPA is concerned.
* The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993
requiresthat federal agencies establish long-term "outcome" goals
and plans to achievethem, along with performance measures for
initialimplementationin fiscalyear 1997.
* The National Environmental Performance Partner-
ship System, an agreement between USEPA and the Environ-
mental Council of the States signed in May 1995, establishes a
"Performance Partnership Agreement" process for states and
their respective USEPA regional offices to negotiate an annual
set of environmental goals and indicators instead of traditional
workplans. Five states - Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, New
Jersey, and Utah - have developed agreements for this fiscal
year and all states are expected to join in the partnership
system during their fiscal year 1997.
* The President's Council on Sustainable Develop-
ment recently published national goals and indicators for
sustainable development in Sustainable America - A New
Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy
Environment for the Future.
* ISO 14000 is the promulgation of a new set of
standards for environmental management by the International
Standards Organization, aimed at organizational evaluation
and product evaluation. Sections of ISO 14000 dealing with
Environmental Management System Standards and Environ-
mental Auditing Standards are expected to be approved in
STATE ENVIRONMENTAL MONITOR - June 3. 1996

2. Guest Editorial
mid-1996. The overwhelming benefit ofa standard of this type
is that it will allow corporations to be environmentally
proactive and ahead of the regulatory curve; to eliminate the
materials, processes, and wastes that subject a company to
regulations; and to subject the competition, particularly off-
shore competition, to a similar set of environmentalprinciples that
u.s. companies have been dealing with for many years.
* Redefining Progress, a San Francisco-basedpolicy institute
focusing on national economic issues from a sustainability -
perspective, will be developing a national indicatorsprogram
modeled in part on the Sustainable Seattle initiative.
* The State Environmental Goals and Indicators Project,
a cooperative agreement between USEPA and the Florida Center
for Public Management, has cataJoguedthe environmental
indicatorsthat have been published by federal and state govem-
ments in the last five years, and currently is in the process of
producing a comprehensive set of environmental indicators for
state use in environmental management systems.
In communicating environmental indicators to
decisionmakers and the public, there is a trend to move toward
presentations that are paperless (i.e., documents on the
Internet), nested, and interactive. The Canadian federal State of
the Environment 1996 is being presented only on the Internet,
replacing a hard-bound version produced five years ago. The
Canadians, preeminent in communicating environmental
indicators, offer nested sets of environmental issue statements,
environmental indicators as fact sheets, and their supporting
data as technical bulletins to enhance outreach to stakeholders.
In the area of environmental education, the British Columbia
provincial state of the environment report is now an interactive
CD ROM that offers access to 150 environmental indicators.
The development of environmental indicators is also
moving toward the ecosystem or watershed levels and toward
the development of social and economic indicators that
complement environmental measures.
Still, there are only a handful of statesthat have the basis for
environmental indicator systems that can be used in environmental
management decisionmaking. The culturaland bureaucratic shiftto
fully integrating environmental indicatorsinto management
systems isjust beginning. Over the coming years, state environ-
mental management agencies will develop complete environmental
indicator systems that will have multiple indicatorsto describethe
environmental issues relevant to their legislativemandates, as well
as subsets of indicators for the public information and other
streamlined sets of indicators (or perhaps indexes)that will provide
accountability for decisionmakers.
There are also signs that the shift will take time. The
states and U.S. EPA, in developing Performance Partnership
Agreements, are developing environmental indicators and
associated measures of program performance in the context of
programs that relate to individual environmental laws. While
this approach is pragmatic in a time of transition as a means to
facilitate grant flexibility, the effort to identify cross-media
issues and overlapping environmental issues of concern to
multiple programs needs to be emphasized in developing
systems of environmental measurement.
As a broad generalization, natural resources agencies and
environmental protection agencies do not communicate and
STATE ENVIRONMENTAL MONITOR - June 3, 1996
cooperate effectively. While there are examples of effective
interaction at the ecosystem level (the multi-faceted National
Estuary Projects funded by USEPA are a positive planning
process), there are artificial demarcation lines between the
management of natural systems and regulation of pollution
that impacts them.
Since data regarding species and habitat health often
support the most representative and evocative environmental
indicators, it is evident that natural resources and environmen-
tal protection professionals need each other. For instance, the
Pacific Northwest Environmental Indicators Working Group,
charged by "The Gang of Seven" (the heads of environmental
protection agencies in the states of Washington, Oregon,
Idaho, Alaska, the province of British Columbia, and the
regional offices ofUSEPA and Environment Canada) to look
into the feasibility of developing regional environmental
indicators, identified salmon as an overarching issueto be
described using indicators. Salmon are one of those "charismatic
megafauna" that seem to fascinatehumans. In the PacificNorth-
west, salmon are a totem animal, a cultural icon representing the
relative health ofnaturaJ systems. To develop successful environ-
mental indicatorsfor salmon, the Working Group will have to find
measures forthe four h's of salmon - hydro, habitat, hatcheries,
and harvesting- combined with measures for water quality, land
use, forest health and other relevant data cutting a wide swath
across a variety of agencies and programs.
Similarly, human health data tied to environmental
management data can support powerful environmental
indicators. Using geographic information systems as a tool, a
number of public health agencies around the country are trying
to link pesticides application data, emergency rooms visits,
and census tract data to develop enhanced knowledge of how
placing stress on the environment impacts humans at the same
time. Linking public health departments to environmental
management agencies through environmental indicators is
another growth opportunity to strengthen both.
How can the development of environmental indicator
systems reconnect environmental management practitioners to
the environment, human health, and the natural resources that
are their responsibilities?
* Environmental indicators represent information as
empowerment, enfranchising decisionmakers and interested
parties at all governmental levels.
* Environmental indicators are a politically neutral tool
representing the environment's status and trends that enable us
to transcend partisan or ideological thinking.
* Environmental indicators are linked to ecological and
human health concerns, with management actions described in
an environmental context.
* Environmental indicators do not mean that less data
will need to be collected, only that indicators can advise what
data are most essential in describing environmental issues.
* Environmental indicators mean that the continuum of
technical and policy practitioners will be linked from those
who physically monitor and sample the environment, to those
who manage the data, analyze the data, develop indicators, use
them in policy development, and use them to make and
articulate decisions.
27

3. ouest Editorial
conditions and trends, thereby designing solutions that
involve integrated environmental management and pollu-
tion prevention strategies that cut across traditional
environmental media lines. The promise of developing
environmental indicators is that environmental issues and
associated data are identified and addressed together by
practitioners with different interests and priorities, enabling
more creative, innovative, and effective measures to be
developed and adopted.
Environmental indicators offer the opportunity to
connect decisionmaking with environmental trends. Environ-
mental indicators are an integral tool that, combined with a
strategic thinking and planning, can significantly enhance the
future of environmental management. 0
* Environmental indicators can assist managers in
linking natural resources conditions and trends with environ-
mental protection issues and problems to solve problems as a
whole and not as narrow sets of interests.
Conclusion
The promise of developing environmental indicators is
that the process will allow practitioners to step back and
examine all of the environmental issues and their associated
data together, leading to enhancement of all other environmen-
tal management techniques and increased knowledge. This in
turn will enable improved decisionmaking and development of
more innovative solutions to problems. Properly done,
environmental indicator systems can form the basis for
increased communication with and education of the public and
the media, and allow better communication within and among
state environmental agencies.
The challenge of developing environmental indicators
is to synthesize, simplify, and condense environmental
information so that we may better describe environmental
(The viewpoints expressed in this article do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of the State Environmental Goals and
Indicators Project, the Florida Center for Public Manage-
ment, or the Us. Environmental Protection Agency.)
------- News Briefs
USEPA ANNOUNCES INITIATIVES TO PUSH NEW
HAZWASTE CLEANUP TECHNOLOGIES
In a bid to aggressively promote new hazardous waste
cleanup technologies, USEPA's waste program has issued a
memorandum to the agency's 10 regions defining various
technology-promotion initiatives, including an end to "unnec-
essary regulatory controls" and fewer permitting requirements.
The l l-page memorandum was issued May 10 by Elliott
Laws, USEPA's assistant administrator for Office of Solid
Waste & Emergency Response, who notes that environmental
technology development and commercialization "are a top
national priority" for the Clinton administration. By issuing
the memo, Laws writes, the agency hopes to help in the
testing, demonstration, and use of innovative "cleanup and
field measurement technologies."
"EPA regional and headquarters managers should support
Remedial Project Managers, On-Scene Coordinators, and other
remedial action decision-makers in using new technologies,"
and should promote such technologies even if they slow down
completion of a cleanup project, according to Laws' memo.
Managers should consider setting up "performance manage-
ment and award systems" for project managers to encourage
the use of new technologies.
With regard to permitting, the memo calls for regions to
streamline their permit processes under the Resource Conser-
vation & Recovery Act, and to consider using existing
alternatives to RCRA Corrective Action; Research, Develop-
ment, & Demonstration; and Subpart X permits. Laws also
asks brownfield cleanup coordinators to use innovative
technologies at those sites.
LOUISIANA SETS UP NEW COOPERATIVE POLLU-
TION PREVENTION PROGRAM
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality is
trying to attract business participation in a new state-wide
pollution prevention effort aimed at encouraging companies to
28
undertake hazardous waste minimization projects relating to
air, water, and other media.
The effortis being pursued under DEQ's Environmental
LeadershipPollution Prevention Program and will rely on state
regulatorsto monitor progress toward pollution prevention goals
that a company signs up to meet. Interestedcompanies must submit
a brief plan setting out reduction goals for selected wastes and
commit to sharing information about successful prevention
activities. In exchange, companies may receive permit
flexibility and regulatory relief, issues the DEQ is now
exploring through a program advisory committee that is
meeting this month to discuss how best to attract business
participation.
DEQ's program follows up on a USEPA waste minimiza-
tion effort launched in 1994 that laid out the agency's national
goals for reducing hazardous waste generation. DEQ's effort
resulted from a partnership with Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil
& Gas Association, the Louisiana Chemical Association,
Louisiana Pulp & Paper Association, USEPA, and the state's
Environmental Task Force.
NORTHEAST AIR REGULATORS WILL ISSUE.OWN
MERCURY STUDIES •
In the face ofUSEPA's problems issuing its controversial
study of mercury air emissions, the Northeast States for
Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) is developing
its own studies of mercury's health effects and its deposition
onto land and water.
USEPA is required to issue a study of mercury emissions
under section 112 of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.
But, under intense fire from industry and members of Con-
gress, the agency recently announced that it was delaying the
report until the latest data and a scientific peer review could be
incorporated into its study.
Northeast state air regulators, however, are forging ahead
with their own reports on the controversial mercury issue and
STATE ENVIRONMENTAL MONITOR - June 3, 1996