Agri-environmental indicators: issues and choices

Pergamon PII: S0264-8377(98)00023-4

Land Use Policy, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 265-269, 1998 © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0264-8377/98 $19.00 + 0.0(J

Viewpoint Agri-environmental indicators: issues and choices

Andrew Moxey, Martin Whitby and Philip Lowe There is currently considerable interest in devising and incorporating indicators into (amongst other things) agricultural and agri-environmental policies. The urgency of this process is increasing ahead of the impending World Trade Organization's inaugural scrutiny of such policies, and the perceived need for further reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet consensus on indicator terminology, let alone methodologiea and data sources, is far from complete. This paper reviews briefly some of the issues relating to agrienvironmental indicators. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Introduction

Contemporary efforts to define and derive environmental indicators stem partly from debates about sustainability, popularized by the 'Brundtland Report' and 'Agenda 21' (WCED, 1987; UN, 1993) and partly from a perceived need to address concerns over the potential trade distortionary effects of environmental policies (De Zeeuw, 1997). Given the areal dominance of agricultural land use in many countries, many of the contemporary research programmes include substantial sections on agricultural and agri-environmental indicators, for example the Pressure or Driving Force-State-Response frameworks promulgated by the UN (1996) and OECD (1997). Different agencies and authors do, however, supply their own working definitions. Hence, Gallopfn (1997) reports that indicators are referred to variously as: variables, parameters, measures, statistical Keywords: indicators, agri-environmeasures, proxy measures, values, meters or measuring instruments, ment(al), outcomes, outputs, processes. fractions, indices, a piece of information, empirical models of reality, signs. Centre for Rural Economy, Department of The common theme running through this list is that indicators are a Agricultural Economics and Food Marketing, University of Newcastle upon vehicle for summarizing, or otherwise simplifying and communicating Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K. E-mail: a.p.moxey@ information about something that is of importance to decision-makers. ncl.ac.uk In this, indicators are not a new concept, but rather a vogue term for the formalized information used in tracking the performance of a system (Fitz-Gibbon, 1990; LGMB, 1993). An indicator relates to some quality, characteristic, or property of a system that is ideally a central, rather than superficial or isolated attribute. The presumption is that, to be useful, different values or states of an indicator meaningfully represent different states or movements of system conditions such that the indicator can be used for monitoring and/or control purposes. As such, indicators are used habitually in a variety of U.K. public policy situations, for example, national inflation rates; health service waiting lists; and University Research Assessment Exercise grades. The next section of this paper reviews briefly the broad options for agri-environmental indicators. The third section concludes.

Indicator options: outcomes, outputs and processes In the context of agri-environmental systems, policy makers are interested in environmental end-states. That is, policy measures are designed and

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implemented with the aim of achieving specified environmental outcomes. These may include, for example, attractive landscapes, clean water and viable habitats. The need for indicators arises because these outcomes are not directly observable, either because of contemporary measurement difficulties or because of long time-lags in the system between changing inputs and discernible changes in outputs. For example, nitrates may take years to move through a complex river system whereas hay meadows may take decades to recover from intensive management. To overcome this time-lag problem, proxy measures are used. These proxy measures typically take one of two forms. First, it is possible to envisage intermediate environmental outcomes. That is, some changes in the agri-environment are readily observable and can perhaps be used to make inferences regarding broader and longer-term trends. This is the classic ecological use of indicator species (Blaun-Blanquet, 1932). Thus, for example, Wynne et al. (1995) suggest a lengthy list of particular species and habitats to use as indicators, whilst the Department of the Environment (DOE, 1996) offer a more selective choice of 'Wildlife and habitats' (see Table 1). Second, however, it is also possible to envisage a set of policy outputs as indicators. That is, rather than focus on actual agri-environmental outcomes, an observable event, from which an outcome may then be inferred, is used as a proxy. This is a relatively common approach, as shown by, for example, the use of area enrolment and expenditure data to monitor Environmentally Sensitive Areas (MAFF, 1996) or area of damage to monitor Sites of Special Scientific Interest (EN, 1997). Table 1 also shows the DoE's (1996) list of 'Land cover and landscape' indicators. Broadly, indicators sl, s2 and s8 are outputs. That is, the area of rural land types, designated areas and environmentally managed land are all relatively easily observed variables that respond to policy signals and can be used to comment (albeit crudely) upon the suitability of land for delivering environmental outcomes, especially when considered in conjunction with s3, s4, s5 and s6, which provide information on the manner in which the area is managed. Indicator s7 demonstrates that the distinction between outputs and outcomes may be somewhat blurred. That is, increasing the length of landscape linear features may be a desirable outcome in its own right, perhaps for aesthetic landscape reasons, but it may also be taken perhaps as an output indicator of a more temporallydistant outcome such as habitat stock. A third type of indicator, a process indicator, might also be usefully considered. That is, end-state outcomes, and indeed intermediate outcomes and policy outputs, are arrived at via some process. This process Table 1. Selected indicators of sustainable development for the U.K. (DOE, 1996) Wildlife and habitats

Landcover and landscape

rl r2 r3 r4 r5 r6 r7 r8 r9 rl0 rl 1

sl s2 s3 s4 s5 s6 s7 s8

Native species at risk Breeding birds Plant diversity in semi-improved grass Area of chalk grassland Plant diversity in hedgerows Habitat fragmentation Lakes and ponds Plant diversity in stream sides Mammal populations Dragonfly distributions Butterfly distributions

Rural land cover Designated and protected areas Damage to designated and protected areas Agricultural productivity Nitrogen usage Pesticide usage Length of landscape linear features Environmentally managed land

NB: The DoE lists are used here as an example of common published agri-environmental indicators. They are not necessarily better or worse than those suggested by other sources.

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is often treated as a fixed black box. Yet the behaviour of agents and institutions within this black box is determined not only by the incentive structure, but also by the attitudes held by agents and institutions. For example, reducing nitrate levels in water or restoring a hay meadow requires changes in management practice, which may be brought about by changes in policy or market incentives or by changes in farmers' attitudes. The suspicion that the benefits of voluntary agri-environmental schemes will be temporary is based on the assumption that, ceteris panbus, current incentive levels will be insufficient to retain farmers within schemes in the longer-term (e.g. Morris and Potter, 1995). If, however, farmers' attitudes towards the agri-environment become more positive, then scheme retention rates may be higher (Colman et al., 1992). Similarly, if traditionally productivist agricultural policy making mechanisms shift towards genuinely more environmental perspectives, then more imaginative schemes may emerge. Attitudinal and institutional process indicators may thus enhance the ability to monitor and predict agri-environmental system changes. Table 2 offers some possible process indicators, including surveyed attitudes, management practices and the composition of policy advisers used to design schemes (Potter and Gasson, 1988; OECD, 1997; Lowe et al., 1998).

Discussion and conclusion Agri-environmental indicators have emerged as one response to policy makers' information needs. To date, much of the emphasis has been upon specific intermediate outcome or policy output indicators, although process indicators are now receiving greater consideration. Within this debate, different academic disciplines may be competing for policy makers' attention and denigrating the alternatives (e.g. Norton and Toman, 1997). For example, economists criticize ecologists for not making their implicit value judgements more explicit, whilst ecologists criticize economists for making simplistic and inappropriate assumptions about environmental relationships and their valuation (Mullen, 1996). Such posturing masks the fact that no indicator type, let along a specific indicator, can be perfect or universally applicable. First, all indicators are constrained by data availability and coverage (Magnuson, 1990; Harrison et al., 1991; UN, 1996). Second, such data as are available are often at a variety of spatial and temporal resolutions, leading to a variety of empirical and computational problems in their combination and aggregation (Robinson, 1950; Openshaw, 1984; Steel and Holt, 1996). Third, the use of any indicator requires a leap of inferential faith. That is, there is a presumption that the underlying science (environmental or social) is sufficiently well understood to relate currently identifiable and measurable indicators to longer-term end-states. This may not always be so: there is considerable scientific uncertainty regarding causal relationships and developmental time-paths in environmental systems (Jakeman et al., 1995); the reversibility of environmental scheme participaTable 2. Possible process Indicators

Surveyed farmer attitudes to agri-environmental issues Farmer enrolment on environmental management training schemes Membership of farming conservation groups Voluntary adherence to Best Management Practices Involvement of environmental groups in policy design Involvement of local people in policy design

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Agri-environmentalindicators:A. Moxeyet al. tion means that current enrolment or expenditure may be a poor guide to future participation; and, although changes in interpretative frames are a crucial factor in determining long-term behavioural patterns, changing attitudes do not necessarily translate into observed behaviour changing (Argyris and Schon, 1978). These imperfections do not mean that indicators should never be used, merely that they should be used with caution and that attempts to promote the exclusive use of an individual indicator, or narrow set of indicators, should be viewed with scepticism. Consequently, in designing indicators, scientists and social-scientists need to inform policy makers about possible imperfections and limitations (Constanza et al., 1992; Wallace, 1994). That is, both the reasoning behind the choice of an indicator, and the methodology by which it is derived from available data, need to be communicated alongside the indicator itself, together with any caveats or limitations to usage: transparency and relevance are crucial to the adoption and correct usage of indicators (UN, 1996; Macnaughten et al., 1997). This perspective may seem self-evident, yet is seemly absent from much of the contemporary reporting of agri-environmental indicators. < bm

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to the Land Use Policy Group (LUPG) for funding the desk research underpinning this paper (Moxey et al., 1998). Any views expressed herein are not necessarily endorsed by the LUPG. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Agricultural Economics Society, Reading 25-27th March 1998, and the authors are grateful for the comments made by several colleagues at that event. Any errors or omissions rest with the authors.

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