From National Indicators to environmental sustainability indices: new challenges

The need of meaningful environmental sustainability indexes for international comparisons is nowadays commonly perceived: the production of comparable national indicators by Eurostat has been enhanced in the most recent years. Such national indicators, as a primary desiderata, should not be in contrast with the – usually more detailed - information provided by other indicators calculated at various sub-national levels. The gist of our paper is to discuss the role of statistics in the production of reliable indicators of environmental sustainability, based on survey and administrative data provided by national and international agencies. Ideally, the statistician should find his/her place in between data release and the economist in order to highlight potentially important and useful relations between environmental and economical indicators. For example one could be very interested in detecting the presence of spatial (or spatio-temporal) clustering of countries in terms of the indicators. In this paper we will mainly focus on descriptive indexes: starting from the Eurostat production of official environmental indicators we will try to discuss the main issues which may arise when those indexes are used in policy making.