Strategic Objective: To develop robust sets of indicators for public- and private-sector decision-makers to measure progress towards sustainable development, and build an international consensus to promote their use.

Achievements and Highlights

• IISD and the Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indicators (CGSDI)—an IISD-coordinated team of international experts—have been further developing the Dashboard of Sustainability over the past year. The Dashboard is an interactive, online tool for presenting sustainability indicators and their aggregate indices. With a grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Environment Canada and several members of the Bellagio Forum for Sustainable Development, we've added new functions to the Dashboard, making trend analysis and distance-to-target analysis possible. The Dashboard was presented at two official events at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and now includes data for over 240 countries and 60 indicators in the domain of the United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development core set of sustainability indicators. The Dashboard's profile continues to grow and governments, businesses and others continue to express interest. Notably, this past year, IISD presented the Dashboard to a meeting of The International Iron and Steel Institute, attended by representatives of 15 major steel companies. For more information on the Dashboard of Sustainability, visit http://www.iisd.org/cgsdi/intro_dashboard.htm

The Measurement and Indicators Team provides expertise to designing tools and building capacity for measuring progress towards sustainable development.

• IISD has now completed the first four of five stages of the Local Agenda 21 (LA21) project being conducted with the pilot Romanian cities of Iasi, Oradea and Ramnicu Valcea. IISD, in partnership with Canada's National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), and with the financial support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), is working with the government of Romania, the National Centre for Sustainable Development in Bucharest and with the three participating municipalities to develop capacity in introducing the LA21 process in the country. Training citizens and municipal staff to be effective in working with all key stakeholders in community development will improve quality of life, provide employment potential and contribute to the further development of local democracy. Highlights from the last year include the successful training sessions delivered by IISD in Romania and the commitment of the national government to expand the LA21 program to more municipalities throughout Romania.

• As part of our role with the next Manitoba Sustainable Development Report, and in addition to specific inputs such as calculating Manitoba's Ecological Footprint (EFP), IISD assisted Manitoba Conservation in designing the overall reporting process and approach. We helped construct the report's analytical framework, worked with the department to create a reporting template and prepared some of the analysis. IISD also took the lead in writing some of the sections and we provided comments on draft analyses prepared by various provincial agencies. In order to initiate the reporting process, IISD and Manitoba Conservation delivered a training session for provincial contributors. As part of our work with Manitoba Conservation, our team started to prepare the calculations for the EFP in September 2002. A series of sectoral and regional calculations followed.

• The United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) third Global Environment Outlook report (GEO-3) was launched in May 2002 in London, U.K. As a Collaborating Centre of UNEP for the GEO initiative, IISD organized a launch at the institute's head office in Winnipeg. As GEO-3 was coming to an end, our contribution was increasingly focused on issues related to evaluating and planning the future of the GEO reporting system. We took the lead in carrying out a Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats (SWOT) analysis of the GEO-3 process from the perspective of the Collaborating Centres. In cooperation with the World Conservation and Monitoring Centre (WCMC) in Cambridge, U.K., we also prepared a comparative analysis of global assessment and reporting systems, and prepared a draft capacity building strategy for the assessment work of UNEP's Division of Early Warning and Assessment (UNEP-DEWA).

The Local Agenda 21 project has had a tremendous impact on community development in Romania.

• In cooperation with Environment Canada and the U.S.-based International Sustainability Indicators Network (ISIN), we redesigned the structure of the Compendium of Sustainability Indicator Initiatives, probably the Internet's most comprehensive directory of sustainability indicator initiatives. We also updated over 100 entries in the Compendium in support of the preparation of Canada's new National Environmental Indicators and Reporting Strategy, and launched the new version at ISIN's Annual Meeting in Toronto in March 2003. See http://www.iisd.org/measure/compendium/

• In March 2003, with the UNEP-Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNEP-ROLAC), we designed and conducted a training session on integrated environmental assessment and reporting that will lead to the small island state of St. Lucia in the Caribbean producing its first GEO-style national reporting on the state of the environment. Building on the methodology of earlier GEO training sessions, the training in St. Lucia was modified to produce outputs directly applicable to the assessment work that follows. As another change of the methodology, IISD will continue to advise the government of St. Lucia throughout the reporting process until the report is published.

• In cooperation with UNEP/GRID-Geneva and the International Network of Resource Information Centres—better known as the Balaton Group—IISD organized a two-day workshop in September 2002 focused on vulnerability and adaptation to multiple forces of change—including climate change—in the largest lake in Central Europe, Hungary's Lake Balaton. This workshop laid the groundwork for a vulnerability and adaptation project starting in 2003 with UNEP and the Lake Balaton Development Coordination Agency (LBDCA), serving as a pilot under UNEP's Early Warning Strategy.

• Effective April 1, 2003, Dr. László Pintér, who has served with IISD for nine years, became the Director of the Measurement and Indicators program. Former Director, Dr. Peter Hardi, remains with IISD as a Senior Fellow.