ppendix C
Environmental Performance Measurement: Current Concepts and Practices Many companies have been measuring various aspects of their environmental performance for several years as part of their internal management of operations and evaluation of performance against policies and objectives, and in some cases to capture information needed for regulatory compliance reporting and monitoring purposes.’ One outcome of these efforts has become a major challenge in itself, namely, the proliferation of environmental performance indicators (EPIs) of many types, each measuring a wide range of aspects of environmental performance and each using a diverse set of metrics and measurement units. There have been several attempts to classify or categorize environmental performance measures or indicators within more orderly and logical frameworks, groupings and headings. These have also, in many cases, been accompanied by attempts to formulate criteria for the selection and assessment of the suitability of EPIs. In 1994, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) noted that: the number of industry associations and standards setting bodies around the world working on environmental performance indicators suggests that many organizations are struggling with how to measure environmental performance from a common reference point for internal management purposes. It is understandable, therefore, that organizations are finding it difficult trying to distil1 complex environmental issues into a few relevant indicators for external reporting.... It will take a significant amount of time and resources to develop common industry environmental performance indicators and to gain consensus from organizations to,use them.* Over the last few years, significant attention has been given by companies, industry associations, and professional and international bodies to the development and refinement of approaches to environmental performance evaluation and in particular to the design, selection and use of EPIs at the company or business (micro) level, as distinct from the macro level. This appendix provides a list of some of the recent studies, surveys and reports by leading organizations about developing and implementing environmental performance measurement and indicators, and summarizes the indicator selection criteria proposed or adopted in some of these reports