Sustainability indicators for Malta

To assess whether a country or a community is moving towards sustainable development, some form of measuring rod is required.

In the economic sphere there are many indicators that measure performance - the most common one being GNP per capita. In the case of the environment, which is multifaceted, constructing performance indicators may be somewhat more complicated. Sustainability indicators are often used for this purpose.

A conference on sustainability indicators for Malta was held at the New Dolmen Hotel, Qawra, last month. The conference, organised by the Sustainability-Indicators Malta Observatory (SI-MO), discussed developments in the computation of 130 indicators, covering population and society; land and areas; economic activities; environment; sustainable development: actors and policies; and co-operation in the Mediterranean.

SI-MO, which is directed by Professor Lino Briguglio, was established in November 2000 with the objective of executing the so-called MED-ERMIS project, which involved collaboration with six other research centres within the Mediterranean.

The Observatory has carried out a substantial amount of work in the field of sustainability indicators. An exercise was carried out to gather information on how indicators are produced by various institutions worldwide, and how data can be collected for Malta.

The focus was on indicators for air, aquatic and terrestrial environments. The studies produced by SI-MO can be found on the SI-MO website (www.um.edu.mt/intoff/si-mo).

In 2002, SI-MO undertook an exercise to compute sustainability indicators for the Maltese Islands, based on the list developed by the Mediterranean Commission for Sustainable Development (the Blue Plan list).

As the Maltese government has a commitment to produce the Blue Plan List indicators, SI-MO decided to collaborate with the National Statistics Office to compute these indicators for Malta. Specialists from various fields were engaged to compute to this end.

During the recent conference, Home Affairs and Environment Minister Tonio Borg expressed his satisfaction with this initiative, stating that the government supported the production of such indicators, as this was in line with Agenda 21.

He spoke at length about the need for sustainability indicators, and why it is useful to monitor development in Malta and assess its sustainability.

The Maltese focal point of the European Environment Agency, Louis Vella, described the EEA's role in support of the production of sustainability indicators.

Alfred Camilleri, the Director of the National Statistics Office, described the environmental indicators the NSO were currently computing, referring to the collaboration between the NSO and SI-MO in this regard.

Professor Briguglio explained SI-MO's role in computing the indicators and stated that this was only possible with the co-operation of many people. He explained that the National Statistics Office is supervising the work produced by SI-MO and eventually the indicators will be passed on to the NSO.

The themes of the indicators

The co-ordinator of the project is Rachel Portelli. During the conference she explained how the Blue Plan/MAP indicators are divided into six chapters. Within each of these chapters there are several themes covering various aspects relevant to the overall topic.

Ms Portelli explained that there are 130 indicators in the Blue Plan List and said that the purpose of the conference was to discuss the methodology used in the computation of the indicators, their suitability or otherwise to Malta and possibly to recommend new indicators that are specific to the Maltese Islands.

The conference found that sustainability indicators are important to assess whether Malta is moving towards or away from sustainable development.

t was also revealed that there is a lack of data in some areas, and often, where data are available these are not compiled in a systematic and consistent manner.

The conference also heard that the main role of SI-MO is to help bring people with different expertise together to compute sustainability indicators that require information from different disciplines.

The SI-MO team is currently working with the NSO to refine the indicators further.

Once this exercise is complete the indicators will be available to the public and presented on an animated CD.