Why are there only 10 indicators/factors?

The limited indicator set describes the place of every sector in the full ?depth? of the economy. This provides a different perspective and level of understanding to many ?shallow? indicators which are each applicable to only a few sectors. In addition, many of the indicators we have chosen are good proxies for other indicators. For example, greenhouse gas emissions and energy use are often useful proxies for air pollutants, such as NOx and SOx, CO, etc. In time the framework will be expanded to include such indicators explicitly.

Why and how were these indicators chosen?

A manageable number of broad indicators were chosen, generally according to the availability of suitable data. These data are taken from various reputable and published sources including national physical accounts from the ABS, federal agency reports (such as energy statistics from ABARE), and from scientific agencies such as CSIRO. Many more indicators will be possible in the future due to the increase in national data collection by such bodies as the ABS. However, greater numbers of factors/indicators per se does not necessarily lead to greater clarity if the depth of analysis is not sufficient to reveal the structure of and connections between sectors.

Can the indicator set be expanded?

Yes, provided reliable data is available at a national level and is amenable to allocation into I-O categories. Better co-ordination between the many government departments and agencies that collect statistical data, better use of information technology to collect data, and a more strategic approach to compiling such data, would all assist this greatly. Such an improved data collection system requires substantial effort (and resources) but the long term benefits to the nation (and to the organisations suffering survey-fatigue!) would be significant.

Why are the indicators grouped into Accounts #1, #2 and #3?

This presentation provides a visual picture of the TBL indicator sets. It was agreed in initial discussions scoping the structure of the report that the grouping of profits/employment/greenhouse was likely to be of most interest, followed by exports/income/water and then imports/government revenue/land disturbance. For ease of presentation, the 10th indicator energy is omitted from some of the representations, although we often delve into it in the comments. This is because on balance, the key policy issue is greenhouse emissions rather than energy input.

How can you describe a sector's TBL performance properly in five pages?

We see the sectoral description as a summary and starting point, not as definitive or exhaustive. It explains the meaning of the standardised results (intensities, averages, contribution to GDP, supplying sectors, etc) in terms of the key attributes of the sector, and identifies some likely future developments. These sector analyses provide comparable and reproducible numerical results which could provide a basis for more detailed sectoral studies (in fact the ISA team at the University of Sydney is currently conducting more detailed research on several sectors).

Why do you use the economy-wide mean for the factor (rather than for example a median) as a reference point?

The economy-wide mean is used because it is the best way to realistically compare sectors which have very disparate sizes and performance across the different factors. The value of the averages as a definitive benchmark could be debated, but nevertheless they are useful reference points for analysing relative performance.

How do the spider diagrams indicate relative performance?

Positions inside the economy-wide average (indicated by the inner polygon), represent a ?better than average? performance against the associated factor. Some factors (specifically land disturbance, water use, primary energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and import penetration) are ?negative? in the sense that a reduction in factor usage implies above average performance. The other factors (employment, income, gross operating surplus, exports and government revenue) are ?positive? in the sense that a factor increase implies ?above average? performance. The scale is logarithmic in order to accommodate indicator ranges that can be many times above and below the economy-wide average.

Can factors be traded off within sectors?

Not really: all sectors have above average and below average performance across the 10 factors. TBL accounting and reporting, particularly at this sectoral level, doesn?t set goals, but it can be used to inform political, policy, business, and consumer decision-making. As one of the project reviewers wrote ? ? TBL accounting is primarily not a tool to enable trade-off choices to be made, but one to better integrate social, economic, and environmental goals?. Trade-off is perhaps then the wrong phrase. Nevertheless, the results show that in almost every sector there are quite disparate positive and negative results in fields of interest to decision-makers.

Does the report identify sectors that are sustainable?

No. Sustainability is an absolute and long-term condition. It is impossible to claim sustainability, even with respect to a single indicator, given our limited understanding of all three areas of the triple bottom line. However, because the indicators are additive (across different levels in the economy) and represent useful proxies for describing hard-to-assess actual conditions or impacts, they are still useful measures of the degree of unsustainability of the economy and sector.

How can you put a dollar value on issues like land disturbance, which are related to biodiversity loss and extinctions?

This report doesn?t put a dollar values on any of the non-financial indicators: these remain in physical units (eg. square metres of land, litres of water, minutes of employment). What it does is reveal the environmental (and financial and social) resources that underpin every dollar in the economy. The methodology uses national I-O tables in monetary terms as the structure of the human economy, and as such connects every physical impact via a monetary intermediary. As a result, important non-market effects, hidden subsidies, non-valued services, resource depletion etc are not included.

Water quality is a critical consideration in Australia. How does this fit in the study?

The water indicator used in this analysis focuses on the volume of mains and self extracted water used. Water quality is not covered by the report. However it would be possible to incorporate reused and recycled water in future work, using similar concepts as contained in the weightings used in the land disturbance indicator. Some of the data to perform this improvement is available now and it is planned to be incorporated into the model. Ground water depletion and contamination are also areas requiring further development.