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Towards Sustainability Emerging Systems for Informing
Sustainable Development Venning Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Venning, Jackie, Higgins, John C.
ISBN(s): 9780585436463, 0585436460
Edition: Kindle
File Details: PDF, 1.57 MB
Year: 2001
Language: english

T O W A R D S S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y
Julianne (Jackie) Venning specialises in environment and natural resource
management. Her earlier work involved the conservation of rural landscapes,
particularly the retention, rehabilitation and re-establishment of remnant native
vegetation. More recently she was responsible for the South Australian State of
the Environment Reporting program. In this role she was involved in the
development of environmental reporting systems at both a state and national
level. She holds a PhD in biological sciences and an MBA.
John Higgins worked on the Commonwealth State of the Environment
Reporting program for three years. He holds a PhD in chemistry and an MA
in science, technology and society. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford and
the Australian National University before joining the Australian Public Service.

To
Sam and Charley
To
their Future

TOWA R D S
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y
EMERGING SYSTEMS FOR
INFORMING SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
e d i t e d by
J a c k i e Ve n n i n g a n d J o h n H i g g i n s
UNSW
PRESS

A UNSW Press book
Published by
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
UNSW Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
www.unswpress.com.au
© UNSW Press 2001
First published 2001
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose
of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested
in UNSW Press, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the
chapter authors. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Towards sustainability: emerging systems for informing
sustainable development.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 86840 667 8.
1. Sustainable development — Australia. 2. Sustainable
development — Social aspects — Australia. I. Venning, J.
(Jackie). II. Higgins, John, 1962– .
338.994
Printer Griffin Press, Adelaide
The views expressed by the contributors in this work are
not necessarily those of the editors or their employers.

Acknowledgments vi
Foreword vii
List of Contributors ix
1 Introduction 1
John Higgins and Jackie Venning
2 Development of sustainability concepts in Australia 22
David Bennett
3 Environmental models 48
John Higgins
4 Economic models 71
John Hatch
5 Environmental indicators: Development and application 90
Jackie Venning
6 Economic measures of sustainability 120
Tor Hundloe
7 Sustainability indicators: Measuring progress towards sustainability 138
Ann Hamblin
8 Modelling physical realities: Designing and testing future options 165
to 2050 and beyond Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy
9 Informing institutions and policies 196
Stephen Dovers
References 221
Index 235
C O N T E N T S

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
The editors would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of the fol-
lowing people during the preparation of this book: Dr Tom Beer,
CSIRO Atmospheric Research; Dr Geoffrey Bishop, Bishop and Associ-
ates, Basket Range, South Australia; Mark Faulkner, South Australian
Department for Water Resources; Allan Haines, Environment Australia
(now retired); Associate Professor Ronnie Harding, Centre for
Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales; Dr Steve
Hatfield-Dodds, Environment Australia; Dr Andrew Lothian, South
Australian Department for Environment and Heritage; Brett Odgers,
Environment Australia (now retired); Dr Ray Wallis, Western Australian
Department of Environmental Protection; Dr David Williams, CSIRO
Energy Technology; Professor David Yencken, Landscape, Architecture
and Environmental Planning, University of Melbourne.

We cannot work to create a future which we do not first imagine.
If humanity is to live on this beautiful planet of ours indefinitely, we
must design and innovate within the next generation or so, the
means of creating a sustainable society, and we must complete a mis-
sion to realise it. This in turn requires that we envision, design and
create sustainable prosperity, which involves the simultaneous
advancement of four forms of prosperity: economic, ecological, social
and cultural.
To create a sustainable society we must be able to imagine it,
model it and understand how it would behave. We cannot work to
create a future that we do not first imagine, and we must be able also
to imagine how it would work through the creation of appropriate
metaphors and models. We must also be able to measure our progress
towards the realisation of a sustainable society through the creation
of appropriate indicators and assessment processes. Finally we must
innovate many new products, services and technologies to market to
the world’s peoples to provide the tools that would enable them to
make this heroic transformation on the ground.
The innovations we will need to create should not only make us
less unsustainable but more sustainable as well. To treat illness and to
cease to be sick is very different to creating health. To lessen a bad
outcome is not the same as creating a good outcome. To improve the
efficiency and effectiveness of fossil fuel engines is not the same as
creating a hydrogen powered alternative and to reduce waste is not
the same as abolishing it.
F O R E WO R D

We need also to create many new ways to measure change in our
world. For example, we need a true partnership of economics and ecol-
ogy in the provision of indicators if we are to assess whether we are
achieving economic and ecological prosperity, as win–win rather than
win–lose. We must be able to measure whether we are doing econom-
ically well while and by doing ecological good, or whether we are still
continuing the ways of the modernist past by doing economically well
by doing ecological bad. Our economists must incorporate the value of
natural capital and of the environmental services provided by nature,
such as the production of clean water or the pollinating roles of insects
and birds, into our measures of prosperity. This will achieve real
progress in our capabilities to measure prosperity in all its forms,
including in concepts such as the ‘triple bottom line’, or as I would
prefer, ‘the quadruple bottom line’.
To realise a sustainable society and to design and innovate our way
to sustainability, we need to create what I call green ways and green
wares. Green ways are the values and attitudinal shifts, the customer
preferences, and the professional practices and ethical behaviours we
need to progress towards a sustainable future. Green wares are the new
designs, products, services and technologies we need to innovate. We
need both, and those who innovate and market these will be the new
leaders in the new green economy of the twenty-first century. These
green ways and green wares will assist us, amongst other things, to live
within perpetual solar income, abolish the concept of waste, protect
biodiversity and avoid or ameliorate all forms of collateral damage.
These concepts are among the design rules we need for the creation of
a sustainable society.
This book will help our understanding of some core aspects of sus-
tainability, in particular our understanding of the working of both sus-
tainable and unsustainable systems, and it will help us develop the tools
to assess whether we are progressing in our journey towards the reali-
sation of a sustainable society. Our hearts tell us that we need a sus-
tainably prosperous society. We however also need to put our best
minds and our highest intelligences to the task of building pathways
towards its realisation. This book is a significant contribution to this
mind work.
Peter Ellyard
Dr Peter Ellyard is currently Executive Chairman of Preferred Futures,
and Chairman of the Universal Greening Group of companies and of
the MyFuture Foundation. He has been a Senior Adviser to the United
Nations system for more than 25 years, including at the 1993 Earth
Summit. Peter is the author of the best selling book Ideas for the New
Millennium (1998, 2001).
V I I I • T O W A R D S S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

DAVID BENNETT was the Executive Director of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities and the Executive Director of National
Academies Forum until the end of 2000. During his diverse career, he
has also worked on environmental issues for the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commission, been a policy officer with the Department
of the Environment, Sport and Territories and was the Acting Director
of the Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies at the
University of Adelaide. He has published on environmental philoso-
phy, particularly environmental ethics, the ethical treatment of non-
human animal species, and population issues relating to the
environment. David is co-author with Richard Sylvan of The Greening
of Ethics.
STEPHEN (STEVE) DOVERS is a Fellow with the Centre for Resource
and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University. He
has spent the past decade researching, writing and communicating in
the area of sustainable development, institutional and policy arrange-
ments for resources and environment, and environmental history.
BARNEY FORAN is an ecologist by training and has spent most of his
career in the rangelands of Australia, southern Africa and New
Zealand. His current task brought him to the Resource Futures group
at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in Canberra in 1993. His current
research interests focus on radical options for the redesign of
Australia’s economy that take it to low levels of energy and material
usage by 2050. The group is tasked with designing and testing transi-
tion pathways ‘towards sustainability’ for national and regional scales in
L I S T O F C O N T R I B U TO R S

Australia. Central to the job has been the development of a number of
analytical frameworks that describe how Australia actually works in
physical terms … the so-called ‘physical economy’.
ANN HAMBLIN specialises in agricultural land-uses and ecosystem
management and currently works at the Bureau of Rural Sciences in
Canberra. Ann has worked on international and national land indica-
tors for the World Bank and Environment Australia, and on national
indicators of sustainable agriculture for SCARM. She serves on several
national and international boards related to environment and agricul-
tural research. She was director of the Cooperative Research Centre for
Soil and Land Management 1994–98. In 1999 she convened the
Fenner Conference on the Environment called Visions of Future
Landscapes and more recently she has prepared the land theme for the
Australian 2001 State of the Environment report.
JOHN HATCH is a senior lecturer in the School of Economics at
Adelaide University. He teaches in several courses in environmental
economics and has a special interest in wildlife resources. He has pub-
lished in the areas of commercialisation of wildlife, waste management
and recycling. Most recently he made a major submission to the Senate
Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee on
the Commercial Utilisation of Australian Native Wildlife. In his spare
time he is an avid ornithologist.
TOR HUNDLOE is Professor of Environmental Management at the
University of Queensland. He is Chair of the Wet Tropics Management
Authority, responsible for the oversight of this World Heritage Area.
He also chairs the Nature and Ecotourism Accreditation Program that
is responsible for certifying ecotourism products. Tor served as Chair
of the Australia Institute in 1999 and 2000 and had been a board
member previously. He was Founding President of the Environment
Institute of Australia. He trained in economics, political science and
environmental management.
FRANZI POLDY is a physicist by training with wide interests in opera-
tions research, energy futures and the relationship between the eco-
nomic and the physical worldviews presented by this analytical
approach. His is currently with the Resource Futures group at CSIRO
Sustainable Ecosystems in Canberra. His research interests focus on
radical options for the redesign of Australia’s economy that take it to
low levels of energy and material usage by 2050.
X • T O W A R D S S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

‘Everyone’s an environmentalist now.’ So said Australian Prime Minister
John Howard at a photo opportunity during the 1998 Federal election
campaign. This statement illustrates how environmental issues have
recently been absorbed into the political mainstream. Increasing politi-
cal cognisance of the environment has been accompanied by the grow-
ing awareness of sustainable development: most famously defined as
‘development that meets the needs of the present, without compromis-
ing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED
1987).
It is not the intention of this book to enter the debate over partic-
ular policies or to argue over the degree to which sustainable develop-
ment is practised. Rather, proceeding from the premise that sustainable
development is the basis of a new, emerging paradigm for corporate,
local, national and global activity, the book explores what sort of infor-
mation will be useful for making decisions in the new milieu. Our
interest includes how this information will be generated, what tools
and methods will be used, what institutional structures are appropriate
to them — and how information will be presented to, and used by,
decision makers. In short, this book is about how to inform sustainable
development.
DRIVERS OF CHANGE
In the pre-industrial era, the resources and capacity of the world’s
ecosystems were so large relative to the scale of human activity as to be
effectively infinite. There are well-documented cases of pre-industrial
civilisations recklessly exploiting, and thus depleting to the point
of collapse, the capacity of the environment — in particular, isolated
I N T RO D U C T I O N
JOHN HIGGINS AND JACKIE VENNING
1

regions. However, human activity was not on a scale to disrupt global
ecosystems (Ponting 1991, WCED 1987).
Industrialisation and the rapid growth of the human population
have changed the equation. There are many more people, and on aver-
age each person makes much greater demands on the environment.
People in the developed world are mostly responsible for raising the
average demand on global resources. Improving the living standards of
the two thirds of the world’s population who live in the developing
world without imposing intolerable strains on Earth’s ecosystems is the
problem for which sustainable development has been suggested as a
solution (WCED 1987).
Human activity now has the potential to affect the functioning of
ecosystems on a global scale. Further, there is strong evidence that it
has done so. This evidence is seen most clearly in the depletion of the
stratospheric ozone layer (WMO 1995) and in global climate change
(IPCC 1995). The environmental effects of other changes, such as
massive deforestation, are still being debated but are incontestably
adverse (UNEP 1999). The local and regional effects of problems
such as pollution and land degradation have also been felt around
the globe. In Australia, salinisation and loss of biodiversity associated
with land clearing are among the most important environmental
challenges.
Awareness of these adverse environmental effects, together with a
realisation that the world’s population continues to grow and that
each person is making, on average, greater demands on the environ-
ment, dictates that attitudes to decision making must change.
Simply put, the world must pay more attention to the environment
or face catastrophe. The alternatives to continued rapacity are sustain-
able development or de-industrialisation and a return to a simpler way
of life. While some ‘deep green’ activists urge the latter course, it is
unlikely to be acceptable to the vast majority of the world’s people,
leaving sustainable development as the only prudent and feasible alter-
native.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND1
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
Our confidence in sustainable development as an emerging paradigm is
based largely on the clear historical trend toward greater awareness of,
and emphasis on, environmental issues, and the concomitant recogni-
tion of the need to take environmental as well as economic and social
factors into account when planning development.
Environmental problems are not an exclusively modern phenome-
non, nor is concern about the environment a recent development.
The city of Florence made laws regulating pollution of the Rivers
Arno, Sieve and Serchio as long ago as 1477. The roots of modern
2 • T O W A R D S S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

environmentalism may be found in the nineteenth century when the
first environmental non-government organisations (NGOs) were
founded, and recognisable conservation movements emerged.
National parks and reserve systems were established, and there were
efforts to conserve resources and regulate trade in wildlife.
There was something quite new, however, about the nature and
intensity of concern about the environment in the late twentieth cen-
tury. There was a surge in environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Some statistics illustrate how dramatic the changes have been
(McCormick 1992):
• in 1992 there were more than 20 000 environmental NGOs worldwide,
one third of which were founded after 1972;
• in 1971 only 12 countries had national environment agencies and today
few countries lack one;
• as of 1992 there were 250 international environmental treaties in force,
three quarters of them established in the last 30 years; and
• the first Green Party was formed in New Zealand in 1972: two decades
later there were more than 20 Green political parties around the world,
11 of which were represented in parliaments.
Five factors have been implicated in the explosion in environmental
concern of the 1960s and 1970s. Firstly, there were broad social
changes that predisposed people in the West, particularly younger
people, to question established values and ways of life. Economic
prosperity offered the security to question and protest without
too much anxiety about the financial future, and at the same time
raised questions about whether the drive for material abundance
that had absorbed previous generations was really worthwhile. The
protest movements against the Vietnam War and patriarchal social
structures, and the fight for civil rights created an atmosphere of
radicalism.
Secondly, there was a series of environmental disasters during the
1960s that received wide publicity. Two of the most famous were the
spill of 117 000 tonnes of crude oil from the Torrey Canyon off the
west coast of England in March 1967 and the terrible mercury-
induced neurological damage suffered by thousands of Japanese in the
towns of Minamata and Niigata. Mercury entered the human food
supply through seafood contaminated by the wastes that factories dis-
charged into local waters, and the companies were finally forced to
admit liability and pay compensation in 1971 (Niigata) and 1973
(Minamata).
Thirdly, there was widespread alarm over nuclear weapons testing.
The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) alarmed many
people, and concern about the effects of fallout from above-ground
testing drifting over populated areas added an extra dimension. The
I N T R O D U C T I O N • 3

environmental and anti-nuclear movements have been, and remain,
closely linked.
Fourthly, better scientific understanding of the consequences of
human activity, especially since industrialisation, was demonstrating the
dangers to the environment and the alarming implications these might
have for people. The health effects of pollution were increasingly
recognised.
The fifth factor was the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring. Despite strong opposition from the political, business,
and even scientific establishment, Carson’s book raised public aware-
ness of the environmental damage being done by pesticides. It was an
impassioned, polemic work grounded in solid science. Had it appeared
a few years earlier, Silent Spring may have had little impact. Appearing
when it did, in an era where the counter culture was developing and
environmental disasters were widely publicised, the book was an
important catalyst for change. Other influential best-selling books
depicting an environmental crisis followed, including The Population
Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968) and the Club of Rome’s (1972) Limits
to Growth.
There have been three significant international developments
in the debate over the environment since the emergence of modern
environmentalism. These are: the Stockholm Conference of 1972,
the report of the World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment (the Brundtland Report) in 1987, and the Rio Earth Summit in
1992.
The Stockholm Conference was the first high profile international
meeting to deal exclusively with environmental issues, and it attracted
enormous public interest. Amongst its important features were the
debate between ‘first’ and ‘third’ world nations on how environment
and development should be approached, the involvement of a range of
NGOs, and the establishment of the United Nations Environment
Programme. The Conference also set the international environmental
agenda for years to come by formulating a Declaration, a set of
Principles, and an Action Plan.
The Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) was a landmark document,
and remains the most important manifestation of the trend toward a
more holistic approach to the environment and development that
evolved in the 1980s. The tendency of the early environmental move-
ment was to view development and environmental protection as mutu-
ally exclusive. Further reflection suggested that ecologically sustainable
development trajectories could be found. The environment and devel-
opment lobbies began to move away from adversarial approaches to
environmental issues and towards co-operative solutions; from
win–lose scenarios to win–win outcomes.
A critical insight of the Brundtland Report was that social as well as

environmental and economic factors must be taken into account as
part of a holistic approach in order to reconcile the environment and
development properly. This insight was not original; the realisation had
been growing throughout the 1980s. The Brandt Report and the
World Conservation Strategy were important steps along this path.
The Brundtland Report was the apotheosis of this way of thinking,
which was encapsulated by the Brundtland definition of sustainable
development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present,
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their
own needs’.
The Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, saw more than
100 nations formally commit themselves to sustainable development.
The summit produced Agenda 21, an ambitious, relatively detailed
plan to achieve sustainable development in the 21st century (UNCED
1992). The summit also expanded the international environmental
agenda established in Stockholm. The new prominence given to bio-
logical diversity through the Convention on Biological Diversity and a
commitment to take action on the enhanced greenhouse effect,
expressed through the Convention on Climate Change, were the most
important additions. A follow-up meeting, known as Earth Summit +
5, was held in New York in June 1997. Some progress was reported,
although many found the achievements disappointing compared with
the high aspirations of Rio.
Each of these major international developments has clarified the
relationship between the environment and development, and strength-
ened commitment to sustainable development. This process has been
mirrored on national and local scales. Many nations, and local govern-
ments, now have strategies for sustainable development, and the
signatories to Agenda 21 report regularly on their progress. Many
companies have incorporated sustainable development into their plan-
ning (Elkington et al. 1998).
AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENTS
In Australia, the first major environmental statutes were enacted in
the 1970s, beginning with the New South Wales State Pollution
Control Commission Act 1970 and the Victorian Environment
Protection Act 1970. The first Commonwealth legislation was the
Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974. State
Governments created agencies to tackle the problems of pollution,
and a Federal Environment Department was established in 1971. In
keeping with the spirit of the 1970s, these early efforts were aimed
at protecting the environment and fixing the problems caused by
development.
In the 1970s and early 1980s there were emotive debates over a
range of environmental issues. Those with the highest profiles were

uranium mining, the flooding of Lake Peddar, sand mining at Fraser
Island, and the proposed construction of the Gordon below Franklin
Dam. Building and construction unions became involved through the
‘green bans’, in which labour was withdrawn from projects that were
thought to be environmentally damaging. Uranium mining went
ahead, and in 1972 Lake Pedder was flooded. However, Common-
wealth Government action prevented sand mining at Fraser Island
and the construction of a dam on the Gordon River below its junc-
tion with the Franklin River.
In these debates, business and conservation interests often adopt-
ed strongly adversarial and opposing roles. By 1992 it was possible to
develop a National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development
(Commonwealth of Australia 1992), which was endorsed by all gov-
ernments and has the broad support of most major players in indus-
try, and the environment movement. Disagreements over the
interpretation and application of the principles contained in the strat-
egy remain, but the various interests have a great deal more common
ground than they did in the 1970s.
The Regional Forests Agreement (RFA) process is an example of
the new more integrated approach. Forests were a commercially valu-
able resource to the timber industry, many workers and communities
relied upon them, indigenous and other people attached important
heritage values to them, and conservationists pointed to their impor-
tant ecological roles, including as habitat for native flora and fauna,
as greenhouse sinks, and as systems for purifying water and control-
ling hydrology. There was intense conflict over the use of forests,
which included large scale demonstrations against forestry practices
and activities.
In 1992, the National Forests Policy Statement (Commonwealth
of Australia 1992) set out principles for forest management that took
economic, social and environmental concerns into account. Flowing
from the statement, the RFA process involved a massive commitment
of resources to develop detailed plans for managing forests sustain-
ably, based on an agreed set of principles and objectives and the
best available information. Although debate continues over whether
individual agreements meet the stated objectives, the process was
grounded in sustainable development principles.
Elsewhere, conservation groups are working with industry to
establish and implement corporate standards (for example, ISO
14000), codes of practice for key industries such as fishing, forestry
and mining, and performance measures to demonstrate the effective-
ness of environmental management.
While it is premature to say that sustainable development has
become the dominant paradigm, there is a clear historical trend to
suggest that it is emerging as such.

INTERESTS, INFORMATION AND DECISIONS
Decisions are not always made rationally, or on the basis of informa-
tion alone. Interests, history, tradition, politics, prejudice and person-
ality all have an important role. Interests are, perhaps, the most potent
factor of all. Where there is broad agreement on desirable outcomes,
or interests coincide, decisions are simplified, although there may still
be disagreement over the best course of action. Where differing inter-
ests are involved, some way of balancing them must be found.
Sometimes, one interest predominates while others are ignored. Such
solutions are rarely stable in the long term, especially in democratic
societies.
Equally, it is overly cynical to suggest that information plays no role
in decision making. On the contrary, the role of information in deci-
sion making is often critical. Information allows better judgements
about how various interests can be advanced, and may change percep-
tions of what is in the best interests of various stakeholders. Where
there is an agreed framework for balancing interests, the information
needs are likely to be most clearly articulated. For example, the Reserve
Bank of Australia has clear policies for deciding whether to change offi-
cial interest rates, and a clearly articulated set of indicators (consumer
price index, average wages, the current account, gross domestic prod-
uct) that are relevant to that decision.
Interests and information are closely related. As a rule, the infor-
mation that a society, government, corporation, or other entity gener-
ates is required in order to advance its interests. This does not mean
that information is simply a species of propaganda; information may
advance interests by enabling balanced and informed decisions about
critical issues as well as being used to sway political arguments.
The emergence of sustainability as a paradigm for development
involves a significant shift in the perceived interests of individuals, com-
panies, societies and governments. The type of information required to
achieve those interests must also change. In line with these changes,
both government and industry tend increasingly to generate their own
environmental information, rather than being informed mainly
through universities, research institutions and environmental lobby
groups.
The development of state of the environment reporting is an
example. The first state of the environment report in Australia was lit-
tle more than a compendium of available environmental facts with
minimal commentary (Commonwealth of Australia 1986). It was fol-
lowed in 1996 by Australia: State of the Environment 1996 (SEAC
1996), the first comprehensive scientific assessment of the nation’s
environment. The Australian States and Territories also produce state
of the environment reports, the first comprehensive report being The

State of the Environment Report for South Australia (Environment
Protection Council 1988).
Corporate environmental reporting is following a similar trajecto-
ry. The Earth Summit called for regular reporting by corporations on
the environmental aspects of their operations. Early reports often took
the form of glossy brochures promoting ‘good news stories’, and some
corporate environmental reports still have this character. Increasingly,
though, corporations are producing balanced, objective assessments
of their progress. Leading corporate environmental reports include
quantitative performance measures, full disclosure of breaches of envi-
ronmental regulations, and assessments of progress against realistic
targets and benchmarks.
Bodies such as the World Industry Council for the Environment
and the World Bank have published guidelines and indicators for cor-
porate environmental reporting. As of mid-1998, some 600 corpora-
tions had produced corporate environmental reports, and some
companies are also reporting on social aspects of their operations in
corporate sustainability reports.
In Australia, the Company Law Review Act 1998 amended the
Corporations Law to require limited corporate environmental report-
ing. Directors must report on compliance with environmental regula-
tions, although small proprietary companies are exempt. Additional
reporting is at the discretion of the company, and Australian practices
generally lag behind those in Europe and North America (Fayers 1997,
Deegan 1998). There are some promising signs, however (Elkington
1999). Major resource companies have led the way, and some are near
to best practice. Western Mining Corporation released a relatively com-
prehensive corporate environmental report in 1995, and BHP a simi-
larly comprehensive document in 1997. Both companies have since
released annual environmental reports.
THE NEED FOR NEW SYSTEMS
In this book, it is argued that new systems are required to
inform decision makers in the context of sustainability. Specifically,
it is suggested that the emerging system must be broadly based,
emphasise economic, environmental and social considerations
equally, use suitable tools and models, and be expressed through
institutions that will both generate the information and respond
to the ‘signals’ received through such information. Three points
about the evolution of new systems follow from the preceding
discussion.
Firstly, the need to develop new systems was not identified until
recently. This is partly because the concept of sustainability was articu-
lated only in the last 20 years (although its intellectual roots twine
through many centuries — see Chapter 2), but also because humans

have only recently recognised the importance of environmental con-
siderations in development. Secondly, a time lag is to be expected
between the emergence of the concept of sustainability and the devel-
opment of systems appropriate to a sustainable society. Thirdly, the dri-
vers behind changes are very powerful. However, it does not follow
from this that systems will swing completely to the ideal forms
described in this book. In practice there are a host of interlinked sys-
tems that will vary considerably in how nearly they approach the mod-
els described here.
INFORMING SYSTEMS
This book deals with the whole gamut of processes and apparatus
involved in selecting data, processing it to generate information, com-
municating that information to those who need it, and using it to make
decisions. The boundaries of the system are thus broad, encompassing
the users as well as the generators of information. We use the term
‘informing systems’ (Dovers 1996) to denote this complex mix. The
expression is deliberately wider than ‘information system’, because our
brief is broader, extending well beyond the question of how data are
processed to create information.
Informing systems are not necessarily formally organised, self-
contained, or even readily identified. One person or organisation may
be part of several overlapping informing systems concerned with
delivering information to different decision makers. Further, these sys-
tems can operate at a variety of levels, from the international to the
local. For example, a national system may deliver information to the
national government, a local system would deliver information to a
local community, and a corporate system would deliver information to
the managers of an enterprise.
For convenience, we will generally refer to ‘the’ informing system,
and often use national scale systems as the main source of examples.
However, the principles described apply equally to systems at other
scales, and attention will be given to local and corporate systems as well
as those that serve national governments.
For analytical purposes, we can identify the elements of an inform-
ing system as: the broad conceptual framework, the interpretative con-
text, theories, models, tools, predictive models, institutional
mechanisms, targets and benchmarks.
INFORMING SYSTEMS IN FLUX
The central thesis of this book is that informing systems are evolving
from a ‘traditional’ to an ‘emerging’ form. Table 1.1 summarises the
characteristics of the ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ systems as well as the
characteristics of informing systems as they are now.

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