Measuring environmental performance for industry: from legitimacy to sustainability and biodiversity?

SUMMARY

In this paper, we argue that environmental business performance indicators are substantially and qualitatively different to sustainable development indicators and thus require different approaches in terms of public consultation, scope of measurement, time scale and range of issues covered. It does so by first reviewing some developments within environmental performance indicators for industry and, after providing a definition of sustainable development, it argues for the necessity of including SDIs in business in a way that reflects the fundamentally different nature of SDIs in comparison to environmental performance indicators for industry. It exemplifies the differences by focusing on one often-missing aspect — Biological Diversity.

Key words:

• Sustainable development
• industrial ecology
• performance indicators
• measurement
• biological diversity