Measuring New Zealand’s progress using a sustainable development approach: 2008 presents an overarching view of New Zealand’s environmental, economic, and social progress over the last 20 years and whether that progress was consistent with sustainable development.
There has been increasing demand for broader measures of progress than GDP and this report provides a way to measure progress across the society, economy and environment in one approach. The data in the report will provide the government, researchers, business, and the public with data to inform policy, research, and debate.
The selected indicators in the report provide information about whether we are meeting our current needs, how our resources are distributed, how efficiently we are using our resources, and what impact our actions may have on the stock of resources that will be available in the future.
It provides a way for New Zealand to think about and measure progress as well as enabling us to compare ourselves internationally. It assesses the direction of the indicators against a desired trend to determine whether we are moving towards or away from sustainable development.
The focus of the report is on long-term changes, and the interdependencies between the environment, economy, and society within an integrated and conceptually robust framework. By comparing changes in the data between 1988 and 2008 (or over the time period available) a trend has been identified for each indicator. From these trends the desired direction of change according to principles of sustainable development has been indicated.
Internationally, the measurement of sustainable development is a well-established, although developing, area of official statistics. In 2006, Statistics New Zealand was invited to participate in an international working group convened by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Economic Committee for Europe (UNECE), and Eurostat (part of the European Commission) to work on statistics for sustainable development. The aim was to ensure greater consistency in measurement and international comparability, with the ‘capital approach’ as its starting point.
The report is a collaborative effort with input from a wide range of government and non-government agencies. Statistics New Zealand would especially like to thank all the members of the advisory group for their involvement: Anew NZ, Department of Conservation, Landcare Research, Local Government New Zealand, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry for the Environment, Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Transport, NZ Society of Local Government Managers, Sustainable Future, Sustainable Business Network, Te Puni Kokiri and the Treasury.