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Report Submitted by Belgium to the Fourth International Workshop on the CSD Indicators of Sustainable Development
Hosted by the Government of the Czech Republic in Prague
19-21 January 1998

1. Context

In order to contribute to the implementation of Chapter 40 of Agenda 21 at the international level, Belgium has helped the efforts of the CSD to develop and adopt a work program on ISDs. As a first step towards this objective, Belgium hosted in 1995 an International Workshop on Indicators of Sustainable Development organised with the Government of Costa Rica, UNEP and SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment).

Consensus was reached, during this first Workshop, on the principle of a Working List of ISDs (from which countries could select the indicators that they may use in their national policies, according to their own problems, policies and targets) and on the need of a set of methodology sheets to design and explain each of these indicators. These principles and list have been adopted by the third and fourth sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development in April 1995 and 1996. In November of 1996, Belgium hosted a second international workshop aiming at structuring and launching the test of indicators. This workshop succeeded in harmonising methodological approaches for the test and produced a set of guidelines to implement the test.

In the meantime, Belgium had decided to become a "testing country" in the CSD Program on Indicators of Sustainable Development. The decision was taken on the 4th of June 1996 by the Inter-ministerial Conference on the Environment (ICE), chaired by the Federal State Secretary for Environment and composed of the three Regional Ministers of Environment and the Federal Minister of Science.

2. Testing of Environmental ISDs

As the ICE is in this way responsible for the testing of the environmental part of the Working List, it can be regarded as the national coordination mechanism for the testing of environmental ISDs. ICE has established a Working Group which is in charge of the implementation of the test, i.e., reporting on the existing information systems and evaluation of the adequacy/usefulness of methodology sheets of the CSD regarding environmental ISDs for Belgium. This Working Group is mainly composed of representatives from the Regional and Federal Environment Ministries. Being the sustainable development international focal point of Belgium, the Federal Planning Bureau (FPB) takes also part to this Group; it provides and assists the participants with all available information regarding the CSD process on indicators, the guidelines for testing, scientific advice, etc. Moreover, FPB has to report the progress made in Belgium to the CSD.

As Belgium has several levels of power (the Federal and the 5 Federated levels: the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region which have been merged, the Walloon Region, the Brussels Capital City Region, the French-speaking Community and the German-speaking Community), the first task of this working group was to identify for each indicator whether the matter covered by the indicator is under federal and/or regional responsibilities. Then, the group compared the CSD Working List to information available in Belgium. The availability of the data may vary from one region to the other, as well as the way to compute the indicator. The group concluded that data are, in principle, immediately available for 21 of the 57 environmental indicators of sustainable development, and that five indicators aren't connected to Belgian features.

The ICE has then decided, on 12 November 1996, that Belgium was to start the testing with the in-depth analysis and filling-in of the methodology sheets of three indicators: domestic consumption of water per capita, use of agricultural pesticides, and household waste disposed per capita. As it seems to be the case in many testing countries, the national testing has started very slowly in Belgium. At this moment, only two indicators (domestic consumption of water per capita, and use of agricultural pesticides) have been duly analysed, discussed and reported with the help of the methodology sheets. One of them (use of agricultural pesticides) was treated by a sub-group of experts specialised in this field (pesticides). The main comments made in these two reports concerned the methodology followed to build the indicator, as well as the relevance, qualities and defaults of each indicator, according to Belgian and international points of view respectively. The use of indicators for decision-makers was also discussed in these reports.

First conclusions can be drawn from these comments:

  • With regard to the methodology sheets, the Environmental ISDs working group agreed on the basis of this first experience that these sheets approach could help our country to measure sustainable development needs and focus national attention on improving the availability of data for the implementation of Agenda 21, if sufficient means are provided to the testing process. Comparisons were also made with the indicators compiled by OECD and Eurostat.
  • Regarding the relevance of the two indicators that received complete comments, the conclusions are that they can bring a significant information at the international level as global evaluation and comparison tool, but they aren't precise enough to pilot the national policies and strategies. Amendments to these two sheets and changes to these indicators were proposed to improve their significance for national purposes.
  • For all questions concerning the implementation of the test, the process is more time-consuming than anticipated. The fact that in Belgium, data for some indicators are organised differently in different Regions of the country improves their adequacy to Regional needs but also increases very much the time required and obstacles to the coordination of the national testing of ISDs.

Regarding institutional support and capacity building, the process isn't advanced enough at this moment to discuss in details this kind of needs. Some additional capacities have been provided for in the context of a Science Policy Program, as described below.

3. Testing of Social, Economic and Institutional ISDs and research efforts at the federal level

Some research programs, among which ones the ambitious research program launched in the middle of 1997 by the Federal Minister for Science Policy, have provided a framework and some means for the testing of Social and Economic ISDs of the CSD´s Working List, in particular, and for the development of sustainable development indicators in general:

  • Regarding Social and Economic ISDs of the CSD´s Working List, the first step consisted (as has been done for the Environmental ISDs) in defining the level of authorities (Federal and/or Regional) which is primarily responsible for each of these ISDs in Belgium and in determining their availability in data. This step is almost completed. It will be followed by the assessment of the scientific and political relevance of each of these ISDs in the context of sustainable development planning.
  • Regarding other sustainable development indicators, two other important projects on sustainable development indicators are also financed by Science Policy: one concerns the development of urban indicators in a set of Belgian cities, and the second aims to develop indicators of sustainable development between Belgian regions and foreign regions as part of a program of EUROREGIO. Also at the federal level, other research programs were financed by the Ministry of Environment. One of them, which took place last year, was aimed at developing Institutional ISDs and provided an excellent report on the conceptualisation of institutions, offering a frame for the elaboration and testing of indicators. Other research programs took place on environmental, social and economic indicators. Their results were discussed in seminars and open meetings during the year 1996. Groups involved in these research programs are mainly Universities.

4. Achievements on indicators at the regional levels

Regarding Flemish Regional indicators, demographic and environmental indicators are published annually in VRIND. The Flemish Government created a database - Functional Regional Database, FRED - to cover all types of policy relevant indicators. All Flemish agencies concerned with environment and sustainable development policies are connected to this database. The Walloon State of the Environment, published each second year, has proved an excellent tool for decision-making to both the public and private sectors in the Walloon Region. The Walloon Government is also developing a central database of environmental data and indicators. In the Brussels Region, the implementation of existing plans includes the use of indicators to assess the performance of policies and actions launched in those fields (waste management and promotion of the biological inheritage - plans for the management of air quality and noise data, are in development). About fifteen environmental and social indicators included in a "dashboard" are published regularly as well as Reports about the State of the Environment (1990,1994). Since October 1996, an environmental statistical observatory has been created to collect data and produce indicators. A report of the notion of "indicators of sustainability", which has different interpretations, has been published.

5. Participation of Major Groups

The testing process is thus launched in Belgium at the political and administrative level for the environmental indicators of sustainable development, but its further implementation and possibilities for opening to major group participation will depend on the level of human and financial resources allocated to it by all departments concerned (not only Science and Environment).

Regarding the involvement of associations in the work on indicators, two conventions between the Federal Environment Department and two NGOs provided the necessary means to comment the Working List of indicators and to inform, by this way, other NGOs and associations on the process of building a core set of indicators of sustainable development. Their main mission at present consists indeed in increasing the awareness of other associations on the potential uses of indicators of sustainable development.

6. Reporting to the CSD

According to a decision taken by the ICE working group, the Federal Planning Bureau, which is also focal point for the testing of ISDs, has completed the Format for Reporting on Progress of the National Testing of Indicators of Sustainable Development, required by the CSD to assess the implementation of the testing of indicators of sustainable development.

For more information, please contact:

Ms. Nadine Gouzée
Coordinator of the Task Force "Sustainable Development"
Federal Planning Office
4749 Avenue de Arts
B-1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
Tel.no.: (32-2) 507-7311
Fax no.: (32-2) 507-7373
E-mail: ng@plan.be

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