The Geoindicator Concept: Application for Sustainable Development

The Geoindicator Concept: Application for Sustainable Development
Antony R. Berger

Chairman Geoindicators Working Group

International Union of Geological Sciences

Adding Environmental to Economic Reporting

For some years now there has been intensive discussion of ways to assess environmental and socio-economic sustainability (e.g. Adriaanse 1993; Woodley et al. 1993, Hammond et al. 1995, CSD 1995, World Bank 1995, Peterson 1997, Moldan et al. 1997). Many new approaches have been proposed for a wide range of indicators dealing with ecosystems, human systems and their interactions.
This dialogue stemmed from the realization of the limitations of traditional economic reporting. In the mid-1970s, the UN Statistical Office began to develop a general framework of environmental statistics. The approach used was one involving concepts of environmental stress and environmental response. This focuses on the interface between production-consumption activities and the state of the environment. Four categories of statistics are identified, dealing with activity stressors, environmental stresses, environmental responses, and collective and individual human responses. Stress at the interface between the human and the ecosystem (environment) was initially regarded as describing something acting on and influencing human well-being, such as the stress on people caused by disasters or human migration as an adjustment to environmental stress, or more broadly as "noxious or potentially noxious environmental forces upon the individual" (Kasperson 1969, p484). Later, a link was made between indicators of environmental stress and response on the one hand and indicators of economic performance and of demand and supply of natural resources on the other (Friend and Rapport 1989).
The stress-response approach has had a major impact on environmental and sustainability reporting around the world (Peterson 1997). This can be seen in the current OECD approach to environmental policy analysis: pressure - state of the environment - socioeconomic consequences - policy response. Some UN agencies now use a variant called the driving forces(pressure)-state-response (DSR) framework in which driving forces are limited to stresses from human activities, processes and patterns that affect the state - and sustainability - of the environment and that elicit various policy responses to correct undesirable situations.
Missing From Stress-Response Frameworks - Nature's Influence
Earlier stress-response frameworks included natural (non-human) as well as human influences. In their list of environmental stresses, Rapport and Friend (1979) incorporated a category for "extreme natural events" such as storms, floods, drought, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides and outbreaks of disease. Recognition of natural stresses is retained in a few contemporary expositions of the indicator framework (e.g. Saskatchewan 1992, and Freedman, Staicer and Woodley 1995) but, for the most part, the focus is now on the effects of human actions on the environment.

This is particularly evident in the "core menu" of indicators that has received official status from the United Nations Committee on Sustainable Development (CSD 1995, and Moldan et al. 1997). The difficulty with this scheme is that the condition of most environments at any time reflects not only human stresses but also natural processes, which may be causing change whether or not people are present. Clearly, harmful human stresses on the environment must be curbed but, particularly in rural and wilderness areas, it may be very difficult to distinguish the effects of human actions that can be controlled from natural influences that generally cannot. Though, policies must obviously be directed to human actions (responses) rather than to non-biological stresses (processes) - one can sue neither God nor Nature - it seems strange to ignore the impact of natural environmental processes and phenomena on the condition (state) of the environment within which humans live. This serious limitation of the stress-response concept reduces significantly its usefulness for sustainability reporting and assessment (see Berger 1997, and Berger and Hodge 1998 for a general critique of the UNCSD framework).

For example, the Canadian stress-response approach to climate change, illustrated in Figure 1, creates the impression that temperature variations (environmental condition) are controlled only by greenhouse gases released from the use of fossil fuels. Yet it is perfectly clear that there are other factors involved, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomena, volcanic gas emissions, and changes in atmosphere-ocean interactions. One might claim that some (or all) of these factors are influenced by human actions, but there is no clear scientific evidence for this position.
Ways to Assess Natural Abiotic Change
The condition of the environment at any time reflects not only human influences but also natural processes and phenomena, which may be causing change whether or not people are present. The long evolutionary history of the Earth and the biosphere has been punctuated throughout by environmental changes, both rapid-onset (e.g. volcanic eruptions, floods) and more gradual (e.g. river and coastal erosion, glacier advance and retreat, ground subsidence). Though some of these changes are beneficial to life, many have reduced the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to provide a place for healthy life, whatever the organism. Some changes are slow and gradual, but many others are rapid enough to be important on the scale of the planning cycle. Examples include floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and changes in sea level, and in the quality (chemistry) of soils and water.
The International Union of Geological Sciences, through its Commission on Environmental Planning (COGEOENVIRONMENT), has recently compiled a checklist of geological indicators of rapid environmental change (Berger and Iams, 1996). Listed here are 27 earth system processes and phenomena that are liable to change in less than a century in magnitude, direction, or rate to an extent that may be significant for environmental sustainability and ecological health. Geoindicators have been developed as tools to assist in integrated assessment of natural environments and ecosystems, as well as for state-of-the-environment reporting. They describe common earth processes that operate in one terrestrial setting or another, and represent collectively a new kind of landscape metric, one that concentrates on the non-living components of the bedrock and sedimentary cover, soils, water, and their interactions with the atmosphere and biosphere (including humans).

The geoindicators are complied to a common format (Table 1) and presented in a checklist, which is available free via the Internet at www.gcrio.org/geo/title. Most geoindicators can be monitored by inexpensive means, though some, such as the quality (chemistry) of soil, groundwater, and surface water may require complex and costly analyses. Some are quite simple, such as shoreline position, presence and condition of desert surface crusts, or groundwater level. Others are composites of many related processes: karst activity, frozen ground activity, and volcanic unrest.

By including measures of past change, such as coral growth rings and annual sediment layers in lakes and reservoirs, geoindicators help to emphasize the importance of the natural earth archive for environmental monitoring. The task of establishing baseline trends is easier now that paleoenvironments can be deduced from ice cores, lake sediments, cave formations and other "proxies", with the kind of resolution that is useful for assessing short-term change. Such geoindicators can function as inexpensive, automatic, field recorders that can be "played back" to extract information on environmental change.
Although the emphasis is on abiotic change, biological and geological systems interact intimately in time and space, so that it is not possible to ignore living organisms. This is especially so when dealing with deposits of organic origin such as peat and soil, the influence of animals and plants on weathering, erosion and deposition, or microbiota that play a mediating role in groundwater chemistry and karst processes.
One problem with any such checklist or menu is that the inevitable, but false impression is given of separate compartments with little interaction. Yet chemical loads and fluctuations in surface water and groundwater, sediments, soils, biota and the atmosphere are intimately linked, and variations in one affect others. Moreover, natural patterns are commonly overridden by human influences. For example, coastal subsidence (the surface displacement geoindicator) may be part of the same overall situation - as in the Mississippi delta - that involves changes in river channel morphology (streamflow and stream channel morphology), loss of nearby wetlands (wetlands extent, structure, water budget and geochemistry), river sediment load (stream sediment storage and discharge), local sea level (relative sea level), and the morphology and location of the shore (shoreline position). Nevertheless, the checklist represents a start, even if at a simple and basic level.
In addition to their role in assessing environmental sustainability, geoindicators can also be useful in monitoring and managing a wide range of societal issues. Table 2 relates some important geoindicators to major issues identified in AGENDA 21.
Thresholds and Policy
A challenge yet to be met is to define thresholds or critical loads involved in environmental change, so that it may be possible to express in specific terms the relative stability of a particular environment. Indeed, if one could set targets for each indicator, or identify clear thresholds or limits that once crossed would require policy action, the process of aggregating a multitude of complex indicators to a small number of readily-understood, higher-level indices would be facilitated. A start on such an approach has been made in The Netherlands (Adriaanse 1993). If this could be done for a broad range of environmental indicators, including those dealing with biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, then it might be possible to combine these with parameters that describe some of the important human dimensions of environmental change - the much-discussed socio-economic indicators of sustainability. After all, decision- and policy-makers commonly demand simple environmental measures involving a few indicators that will tell them, and the general public, what progress is being made towards environmental sustainability.
The danger of such an approach is that a high-level index, comparable perhaps to an environmental GNP, may suggest that the environment and human systems are improving, whereas a destructive earthquake or hurricane, warnings of which may not show up in such an index, could nullify the improvements. Moreover, one may well question the wisdom of trying to represent open natural systems by single measures.
Human Vs Natural Influences
Most of the processes and their outcomes described by geoindicators are subject to change whether or not humans are present. Indeed, these are the major ways in which landscapes have developed and evolved throughout time. There is no question that dust storms, glacier advance and retreat, surface uplift and subsidence, and stream sediment storage and discharge, for example, have operated as integral components of nature throughout the long evolution of our planet. Now, however, human actions can have a direct impact upon most natural processes, and these influences become more marked as populations increase and economic growth proceeds (e.g. Turner et al. 1990).
Although we are now a major force in nature and the environment, it is essential to recognize that the latter are always changing at one temporal and spatial scale or another, regardless of human actions (Dickinson 1995). Environmental sustainability must, therefore, be assessed against a potentially moving background. Table 3 is an attempt to assess the relative influence of human and natural (non-anthropogenic) stresses on geoindicators, though it excludes from consideration possible indirect changes brought about by global-scale, human-induced climate change.
The problem is that away from obvious sources of human disturbance (cities, waste disposal sites, mines), it may be extraordinarily difficult to separate the effects of human actions from those due to the "background" natural processes, that is to distinguish the effects of nature from those of humans. Even in remote and sparsely populated areas, such as the Arctic, there may be indirect, far-travelled human influences, such as long-range aerial transport of acid pollutants or human-induced climate warming.
Groundwater plumes from waste disposal sites or other point-sources of pollution are clearly anthropogenic, as are changes in fluvial systems (e.g. stream channel morphology, stream sediment storage and discharge) related to dams and reservoirs, irrigation systems, and river diversions. Even earthquakes can be induced by surface loading of water in reservoirs, or around oil fields where hydrocarbons are pumped from the sub-surface. But how does one separate out human trends from natural ones? For example, the underground dissolution of limestone, which leads to the development of collapse features such as sinkholes, is always at work, so that it may not be possible to be certain in a karst terrain of the added effect of increased water extraction for human use.
None of this is to argue, as some do, that a laissez faire attitude to environmental regulation is best, that we might as well do what we like because nature is unpredictable. Clearly, harmful human stresses on the environment must be curbed, if only for the sake of prudence. The challenge is to deal with both human influences, which may be predicted and controlled, and natural ones that cannot.
Summary

No long term planning of new developments should ignore the importance of natural change, even if it is not always possible to separate human from non-human stresses. Neither should variations in abiotic condition be discounted, for these can have profound effects on urban areas, rural populations and ecosystems.

Geoindicators provide a framework for recognizing and assessing non-biological landscape changes that are rapid enough to be important to environmental planning and management. They help to identify what is changing in the environment, why this is important and what can be done about it. The International Union of Geological Sciences stands ready to assist local efforts to understand and assess the effects of rapid geological change.
References
Adriaanse, A. 1993. Environmental policy performance indicators. Sdu Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, The Hague. 174pp

Berger, A.R., 1997. Assessing rapid environmental change using geoindicators. Environmental Geology, vol 32 (1), 36-44.

Berger, A.R. and R.A. Hodge, 1998. Natural change in the environment: A challenge to the pressure-state-response concept. Social Indicators Research, vol. 44, 255-265.

Berger, A.R. & W.J. Iams (eds) 1996. Geoindicators: assessing rapid environmental changes in earth systems. A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam. 466p.

CSD 1995. Programme of work on indicators for sustainable development. UN Economic and Social Council Document E/CN.17/1995/18.

Dickinson, W.R., 1995, The times are always changing: the Holocene saga. Geological Society of America Bulletin, vol. 107, p. 1-7.

Environment Canada 1998. State of the Environment Bulletin 98-3, Government of Canada, Ottawa.

Freedman, B., C. Staicer & S. Woodley 1995. Ecological monitoring and research in greater ecological reserves: a conceptual framework. In Herman, T.B., S. Bondrup-Nielsen, J.H.M. Willison & N.W.P. Munro (eds). Ecosystem monitoring and protected areas. Wolfville. Science and Management of Protected Areas Association, Nova Scotia. 590p.

Friend, A. M., and D.J. Rapport 1989. Environmental information systems for sustainable development. Proceedings of 7th Annual Meeting of the International Association for Impact Assessment, Montreal. 24 - 28 June, 1989. Institute for Research on Environment and Economy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa.

Hammond, A., Adriaanse, A., Rodenburg, E., Bryant, D. and Woodward, R. 1995. Environmental indicators: a systematic approach to measuring and reporting on environmental policy performance in the context of sustainable development. World Resources Institute, Washington DC. 43pp

Kasperson, R.E. 1969. Environmental stress and the municipal political system. In Kasperson, R.E. & J.V. Minghi (eds) 1969. The Structure of Political Geography: 481-500. Aldine Publishers, Chicago.

Moldan, B., S. Billharz, & R. Matravers (eds) 1997. Sustainability Indicators. Report of the Project on Indicators of Sustainable Development. SCOPE 58. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. 305p.

Peterson, P.J. 1997. Indicators of sustainable development in industrializing countries. Volume 1 - Management response strategies. Lestari, Universiti Kebangsaan, Bangi. 131p.

Rapport, D., & A. Friend 1979. Towards a comprehensive framework for environmental statistics: a stress-response approach. Statistics Canada Catalogue 11-510. Ministry of Supply and Services Canada, Ottawa.

Saskatchewan 1992. Saskatchewan's state of the environment report: The need for environmental indicators 1992. Saskatchewan Environment and Resource Management.

Turner, B.L., Clark, W.C., Kates, R.W., Richards, J.F., Matthews, J.T. and Meyer, W.B. 1990. The Earth as transformed by human action: Global and regional changes in the biosphere over the past 300 years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 713pp

Woodley, S., Kay, J. and Francis, G. 1993. Ecological Integrity and the Management of Ecosystems. St. Lucie Press. 211pp

World Bank, 1995. Monitoring environmental progress: A report on work in progress. Environmentally Sustainable Development. World Bank, Washington DC. 82pp

CAPTIONS:
Table 1: Format for compiling geoindicators
Table 2: Relevance of geoindicators to aspects of environmental management and planning
Table 3: Natural vs human influence on geoindicator change in less than 100 years. (From Berger 1997).
Figure 1. Canadian version of the DSR framework for environmental reporting, here dealing with climate change. The lower portion of each ellipse lists the key indicator. From Environment Canada State of the Environment Bulletin 98-3, Spring 1998.