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Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards

Our expertise on statistical methodologies and in developing sound composite indicators provides policy-makers with the ‘big picture’ for informed policy decisions and progress monitoring.

  • Page | Last updated: 15 Mar 2021

COIN Open Day - Environmental Sustainability Gap (ESGAP)

This workshop brings together the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London with scientists of the European Commission’s Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN) with a view to discuss together how to further improve the Environmental Sustainability Gap (ESGAP) and to ensure that it is developed using the highest standards in composite indicator methodology.

Composite Indicators

Coin Open Days → more info

Date of event: Friday, January 24, 2020 - 09:30 to 17:00

Where: Ispra, Italy

Aim:

This workshop brings together the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London with scientists of the European Commission’s Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN) with a view to discuss together how to further improve the Environmental Sustainability Gap (ESGAP) and to ensure that it is developed using the highest standards in composite indicator methodology.

Description:

The ESGAP Index is a composite indicator of strong sustainability at country level. It measures country performance across four broad ecosystem function categories (source, sink, life-support, and human health and welfare) using distance-to-target indicators where the target is set by a science-based standard. These standards are intended to represent conditions under which the potential of natural capital to provide ecosystem goods and services might be compromised. The index has a value between 0 and 100; 0 being completely unsustainable and 100 meaning that all the underlying indicators comply with the environmental standard. By linearly extrapolating current trends, the ESGAP index can be used to compute the time that it would take to close the environmental sustainability gap, which we refer to as Years to Environmental Sustainability (YtES).

Societal impact:

The ESGAP index and YtES are intended to provide metrics at country level that allow measuring progress towards or away from environmental sustainability (as characterised by the scientific literature). The ESGAP index responds to the demands made from the ‘Beyond GDP’ community on the need for a single environmental sustainability metric that can complement GDP in its (mis-)use as a headline indicator for development. Likewise, the index can also help contextualise countries’ performance against national environmental policy targets or the environmental indicators in Sustainable Development Goals, which are likely to differ from science-based standards. YtES can also play a role here or as a communication-oriented indicator that provides a very simple message: are we making progress towards environmental sustainability? Currently, the index is being calculated for European countries, but pilots will be soon launched to expand the exercise to less industrialised countries.