Doc. 9486

11 June 2002

Environmental accounting as a sustainable development tool

Motion for an recommendation

presented by Mr Giovanelli and others

1.       Ten years after the Rio de Janeiro Summit on the environment, sustainable development is a recognised goal, but an increasingly difficult one to reach.

2.       Environmental policies are making inadequate headway against the negative trend of human impact on the global environment because population, consumption, trade, pollutant emission and the use of natural resources are increasing at non-sustainable rates.

3.       International agreements and government policies on the environment remain sectoral and subsidiary in relation to the main thrust of economic and development policies: they are not integrated into those policies as they should be, nor do they have a decisive impact on them.

4.       To create the conditions for adequate and integrated governance of the economy and the environment, sustainability policies must make a quantum leap and renew their instruments. Specifically, the environment variable must be included in the assessment of economic, financial, fiscal and budgetary policies.

5.       This calls for the testing, adoption and continuous use of new information and evaluation systems and new decision-making procedures involving not only the environmental authorities but all decision-making bodies, starting with the drafting of public budgets. Local and regional authorities must also be more open and more answerable to the public on the subject of the environment and the social and environmental consequences of development. This means integrating and reorganising the basic components of public accounting and of governments’ and local and regional authorities’ formal budgetary procedures to enable them to take account of the environmental effects of the policies adopted.

6.       As long ago as the early 1990s the UN drew up a guide to a system of economic and environmental accounts, and the European Union’s Fifth and Sixth Environmental Action Programmes also stress the importance of integrating environmental policies and all other sectoral policies.

7.       In particular, the Fifth Action Programme recommends that policy-makers adopt decision-making aids such as information on the state of the environment and data and indicators on carrying capacity as a means of determining sustainable development criteria more accurately. It also requires member states, as from 1995, to submit national budgets drawn up according to ecological criteria, on an experimental basis.

8.       The EU’s Sixth Environmental Action Programme, launched in 2001, stresses the need to produce reports on the main environmental indicators, to devise integrated indicators for the various sectors, to work out epidemiological indicators and indicators of the cost of environmental damage and to help member states introduce suitable data collection systems.

9.       Lastly, the European Parliament has recommended that member states adopt “satellite accounts” - environmental accounting tools parallel to those of financial and economic accounting – as the most appropriate means, for the time being, of taking account of the “depreciation” of natural assets.

10.       Many towns and cities that signed the Aarlborg Charter have tested or are testing environmental accounting systems or systems for checking the amount of environmental expenditure and its effectiveness at local level. The EU has also financed a project (LER Life Environment programme) for experimenting with the adoption of an environmental budget in 20 Italian towns and provinces by 2003.

11.       Speedier action must be taken to shift the operational potential of environmental accounting from purely informative studies and functions to the implementation of new official procedures for policy-making, especially for the drafting and adoption of public budgets at all levels.

      The Assembly therefore recommends that the Committee of Ministers include in the Organisation’s intergovernmental work programme an activity on the adoption of harmonised environmental data systems and environmental accounting procedures, at all levels of government: national, regional and local.

Signed : ¹

Giovanelli, Italy, SOC

Behrendt, Germany, SOC

Briane, France, EPP

Coifan, Romania, LDR

Crema, Italy, SOC

Fehr, Switzerland, LDR

Fernández Aguilar, Spain, EPP

Goulet, France, EDG

Grissemann, Austria, NR

Gubert, Italy, EPP

Kalkan, Turkey, EDG

Schicker, Austria, SOC

Stoejberg, Denmark, LDR

Timmermans, Belgium, SOC

Tiuri, Finland, EPP

Velikov, Bulgaria, NR

¹        SOC: Socialist Group
      EPP: Group of the European People’s Party
      EDG: European Democratic Group
      LDR : Liberal, Democratic and Reformers’ Group
      UEL: Group of the Unified European Left
      NR: not registered in a group