Frameworks for Environmental Assessment and Indicators at the eea

Table 9.1. Some criteria for assessing environmental integration into
economic sector activities (continued ).
D
Monitoring and Reporting Integration
19 Is there an adequate sector and environment reporting mechanism that tracks
progress with these objectives, targets, and tools?
20 Is the effectiveness of the policies and tools for achieving integration evaluated and
reported, and are the results applied?
Source: EEA (1999b).
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and shared learning between administrations and sectors, and they support under-
standing of how to promote integration.
Addressing the Context of Sustainability: Sustainable
Development Models and the GEAR-SD Approach
The EEA role in the SD policy process lies mainly in ensuring that environmental con-
cerns are addressed at an appropriate level in progress reports or when new policy pro-
posals are being developed (sustainability impact assessment).
Assessing and reporting on progress with SD is a difficult and complex task. Cur-
rent international SD reporting initiatives, such as the EU Spring Council reporting
(using the “structural indicators”) and ongoing work of the UN Commission on Sus-
tainable Development (CSD), consist mainly of the bringing together of some key
indicators developed for each one of the three SD pillars or spheres of interest (i.e.,
combining environmental indicators, social indicators, and economic indicators). The
CSD also includes a fourth, institutional pillar addressing governance issues. However,
SD will not be achieved simply by combinations of different sets of policy objectives
because this would result in a weak compromise. Rather, reformulation and integra-
9. Policy Integration, Sustainable Development
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149
Figure 9.1.
Virtuous cycle for EPI.
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