Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2. Generating and selecting the indicators. This will be done on a structure classiied
into areas, subsystems, blocks or levels, in order to facilitate their analysis
by specialization
[15]
. The indicators will be selected based on their previous
characterization according to their suitability (signiicant, mature, not redundant,
with adequate geographical coverage and integrable), the quality of the data
required (available at a reasonable cost, reliable, and methodologically consistent),
and their social impact (interest, resonance, whether they are understandable and
easy to communicate).
3. Technical construction and application of the selected indicators. This will allow
them to be quantiied and compared on different scales for speciic years (synchronic
comparison) and to analyze trends over time (diachronic comparison). In doing
this, it is important for the selection of relative indicators to include not only
trends (percentage of variation over time) and the relativization of the indicator
by population and by area, but also other data and variables which help to provide
a better understanding of the indicator, and to qualify its complexity.
4. Establishing critical and desirable threshold values, and objectives for realistic
progress towards the desirable objectives. This will be done using reference
values which allow a preliminary estimation or approximation in terms of
distance.
The threshold values are considered limit; this means that in principle, there
could be a negative limit or critical value, and another optimal or desirable value.
The critical value indicates the minimum or maximum value that an indicator
may have, below or above which there is clearly a situation of unsustainability,
which is therefore the direct opposite of the desirable values corresponding to the
optimal - albeit utopian - situation to be attained. As there is no official operative
measurement of sustainable development, in most studies this is estimated based
on the best existing situation in the scope of the study, or greater
[16]
.
The objective values must establish some pragmatic progress towards the
desirable values; this progress will be more accelerated the further they are from
the desirable values in order to reach a rapid convergence. Greater efforts will
be required towards the end, as we come closer to reaching the desirable values.
These values or intervals are the ones we wish to attain as the ultimate objective
of the policy to be applied, and they are estimated in terms of distance and
convergence.
5. Communicating and using the indicator system. This involves transferring the
indicators to the users (politicians, public managers, society, …) to enable the results
to be used in the decision-making process, thereby legitimizing the indicators.
In order to ensure their usefulness, they must be expressed and then submitted to
debate at different levels of complexity (the most complex for experts, through
to the simplest). There should be a limited number of indicators per debate (about
ive), with one predominant and other secondary indicators.
6. Generating new indicators. These will become progressively more complex,
dense and transversal between the sectors (e.g., accessibility and social well-being)
and between different scales.
