The aim, says Meacher, is to create a complete picture of the nation’s
wellbeing by presenting pointers to environmental and social performance
alongside economic statistics. With this in mind, the government is developing a
set of 8 to 10 “sustainability indicators” to entice the public with easily
digestible bites of information condensed from the original detailed scientific
data. The pointers are also intended as a guide for government and local
authorities. They are the first of their kind in the world and will form the
centrepiece of a White Paper on sustainable development to be published later
this year.

“At the moment all the focus is on GDP, which is an inappropriate single
measure of national welfare,” says Hilary Hillier, head of environmental
statistics at the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR),
who is overseeing the development of the new indicators. They will, she claims,
let ministers consider the bigger picture before making policy decisions.

Although environmental campaign groups, academics and statisticians are
broadly supportive, some experts have reservations. Will such simplified
indicators be scientifically credible or meaningful? There is a danger, they
warn, that they might be so crude as to pervert the message of the original data
and send public and policymakers careering off in the wrong direction. To take
one example, environmental groups are lobbying for the extent of hedgerows
across the country to be used as the key indicator for the health of Britain’s
wildlife. But experts point out that this might prompt farmers to favour
hedgerows at the expense of other environmental priorities, such as cutting down
the use of damaging chemicals.

Hillier admits that it will not be easy to fulfil Meacher’s instructions to
boil down the 120 indicators produced in 1996 by former environment secretary
John Gummer, to help the government track its environmental progress, into a
handful that “encapsulate sustainable development”. “What we are doing is only
quasi-scientific. Of course there is a danger that we may miss out major impacts
on the environment. But we are aiming to convey a general message that gives a
balanced overall picture, not trying to produce the full story.”

Slow progress

In May, civil servants, scientists and representatives of pressure groups
will meet for a brainstorming seminar designed to generate a short list of key
indicators. However, developing them is proving slow and difficult. The DETR’s
expert advisory group on air quality indicators, for example, has concluded that
it would be both misleading and scientifically unsound to produce a single
national measure of all the pollutants pumped out annually across Britain. “In
an ideal world we would produce a single aggregate figure for nitrous oxides,
ozone, particulates and all the other pollutants measured at all monitoring
sites across Britain throughout the year,” says Neil Hurford of the National
Environmental Technology Centre in Culham, Oxfordshire, a member of the advisory
group. “In practice, we agreed the technical difficulties would be
insurmountable and the danger of misleading results too high.”

The researchers are now considering using a single pollutant as a measure of
national air quality, one that best reflects the contribution of all the others.
Alternatively, in preference to actual pollution levels, says Hillier, the
department may opt for an indicator that measures the trends in industry and
lifestyle that contribute to poor air quality, such as rates of traffic
growth.

Researchers have also encountered problems in trying to devise a single,
accurate measure of the “tranquillity and beauty of the countryside”. Meacher
wants this to be a key indicator because it is an issue close to the nation’s
heart. But the government’s own advisory agency, the Countryside Commission, has
said quite bluntly that it would not be feasible to measure such a subjective
concept. The commission has now hired consultants to help it come up with an
answer.

Alex McGillivray of the London-based New Economics Foundation, which has
pioneered local “quality of life” indicator projects in communities around
Britain, says such qualms amount to unnecessary nit-picking. “Groups like the
Campaign for the Protection of Rural England have already done work in this
area, suggesting that you could measure the amount of land disturbed by traffic
and aircraft noise, or by pylons and roadside advertising. Obviously there is
scope for indicators to be misleading, but if the strategy behind them is sound
and not simplistic then there is no need for scientists to feel
łÜ˛Ôł¦´Çłľ´Ú´Ç°ůłŮ˛ą˛ú±ô±đ.”

Not all the indicators will be so tricky. “Wildlife health”, for example, is
likely to be measured in terms of farmland bird populations, an area of research
where decades of scientifically rigorous data are available. “If we can use a
bird indicator as what you might call a FTSE-type index for all British
wildlife, which shows incontrovertible evidence of wider problems in the
countryside, it would be a crucial factor in driving change,” says ecologist and
statistician Richard Gregory, who heads the census unit at the British Trust for
Ornithology. “Choosing farmland birds would be based in sound science because
not only are the trends well documented, but we also know that they are a good
indicator of general wildlife health. Declines in farmland birds, for example,
have been shown to correlate with declines in wildflower species and hare
±č´Ç±čłÜ±ô˛ąłŮľ±´Ç˛Ô.”

For the sustainability indicators to be newsworthy and meaningful, the
government will need to improve the way it gathers environmental and social
data. At present, most national environmental data lags behind by several years.
Current published figures for carbon dioxide emissions, for example, date from
1995. “The Treasury has the staff to make sure its quarterly economic forecasts
are accurate and bang up to date,” points out McGillivray. “We need the same for
indicators if they are to be set alongside GDP and used properly by the
Chancellor to make policy.”

Whatever their shortcomings, there is no doubt that environmental and social
indicators are here to stay. Even the sceptics generally agree that GDP alone is
an inadequate measure of national wellbeing. Indeed, there is now an entire
international industry aimed at devising measures of natural social wealth to
complement traditional economic barometers.

The German and Dutch governments, for example, are planning to follow
Britain’s lead in testing out a clutch of headline indicators. The European
Environment Agency is developing databases to measure environmental trends
across the continent. And World Bank experts are trying to produce workable
global measures of natural and social wealth.

Most governments and agencies are producing indicators based on a model of
environmental problems originally devised by the OECD, the club of
industrialised nations based in Paris. The OECD itself now produces a
twice-yearly set of 33 environmental pointers allowing officials to compare
trends across 23 member states in Western Europe, North America and Asia.

However Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Commission, is
taking a more controversial tack. Later this year it plans to publish a set of
10 indices covering environmental development across the whole of the European
Union, condensing the hugely varied environmental trends between different
countries into a pan-European short list.

The result will be media-friendly and accessible, but statisticians are
uneasy about the methodology. They say it highlights how dangerously removed
over-simplified indicators can be from a sound basis in science. Meacher is
confident that, by contrast, Britain’s gesture towards measuring sustainable
development will not be an empty one.

But in southern Africa over the past seven years elephant numbers have risen
steadily despite official culling, and this has fuelled demands from the
region’s cash-strapped governments for the ban to be lifted. Four months from
now, the world’s governments will face a controversial decision on whether to
allow the lucrative sale of ivory to resume.

Last week Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana formally sent to the 135 member
nations of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) proposals to trade ivory between themselves and with Japan. In the
biggest challenge yet mounted to the ban, the southern African nations argue
that they have curbed poaching and that the needs of their elephant herds
increasingly conflict with those of farmers and villagers.

The solution, they say, is to sell their ivory stockpiles, worth millions of
dollars, to raise revenue for conservation. The three countries stress that the
trade would be strictly controlled and that Japan, where there is a huge demand
for personal ivory signature seals, would be the only other country
involved.

These arguments have won sympathy from many Western governments, including
the US and Britain. Sensitive to charges of being held hostage by
“bunny-hugging” interest groups, they have become increasingly receptive to the
idea of harvesting and trading in wildlife as a means of raising money for
conservation. As a result, the political tide appears to be running in favour of
reversing the ivory ban, and experts are predicting a close vote at the CITES
meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, in June.

However, Zimbabwe’s crusade now faces a serious threat from an impending
report by CITES experts into ivory trade controls in southern Africa. A 12-page
confidential draft of the report, seen by żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, claims that
Zimbabwe’s enforcement of its internal ivory trade laws, which are set by its
own government rather than CITES, is “grossly inadequate”. The draft also claims
that the country exported “large commercial shipments of ivory” last year in
breach of its own laws. It concludes that control of Zimbabwe’s ivory carving
industry, Africa’s biggest, “appears to have broken down”.

These revelations could be devastating. Most of the CITES member states are
waiting for the official publication of the report next month before deciding
how to vote in June, and Zimbabwe’s campaign to lift the ban rests on its
claimed ability to keep tight control over any trade in ivory.

Technically, it is not illegal for Zimbabwe to export even large quantities
of ivory, as it exempted itself from the 1989 ban. However, it is illegal for
any CITES member to import ivory, and since 1990 Zimbabwe itself has only issued
export permits for up to five pieces of carved ivory destined for the
recipient’s “personal use”.

The CITES team discovered that sales of ivory held by the Department of
National Parks and Wildlife Management (DNPWLM) were soaring. The department’s
secured store holds 28 194 tonnes of ivory from poached and culled elephants,
and between 1992 and 1995 sales averaged 3.6 tonnes a year. In the first nine
months of 1996, however, 10 tonnes were sold. The CITES team reports that large
amounts of raw, semiworked and worked ivory from the stockpile are being sent
around the world, and that dealers are bypassing the law by stamping the
shipments with “personal use” permits. Last year commercial shipments were
exported to Japan, South Africa, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines,
Indonesia and the US.

The biggest of these, sent to Japan, consisted of ivory carved from 70 tusks
and worth $90 000. The authors of the CITES draft accept that Zimbabwe’s
beleaguered wildlife department is desperately in need of cash, but they
question the competence of a wildlife department that has failed to prevent
major illegal ivory exports in recent months.

Last December, in another blow to the country’s campaign to lift the ivory
ban, an inquiry by a committee of Zimbabwean MPs revealed that the DNPWLM, long
hailed as the jewel in the crown of African conservation, was “riddled by
corruption, infighting . . . and low morale”. It also warned that poaching was
once again on the increase as communications within the country’s national parks
had broken down.

The MPs’ allegations of corruption and mismanagement were vehemently denied
by Zimbabwe’s Minister of Environment and Tourism, Chen Chimutengwende. And at a
CITES standing committee meeting in Rome, also in December, a Zimbabwean
delegation headed by DNPWLM director Willas Makombe strongly rebutted claims of
incompetence from the CITES experts that had been leaked earlier. In a lengthy
statement, the delegation said it was “simply mischievous” to link the recent
rise in sales of stockpiled ivory to mismanagement or a lack of adequate trade
controls. Any “shortcomings” which had occurred last year had been due to a lack
of funds and to staff vacancies which were now being filled.

Conservationists claim that the CITES report underlines the huge problems
involved in regulating trade in wildlife products, such as ivory and rhino horn,
which carry high price tags on the international market. They agree that some
African conservation programmes involving the sustainable use of wildlife, in
which money from hunting is channelled back into local communities, have been
markedly successful, giving the people who live among the wildlife an incentive
to preserve it. But the picture changes when products from the animals killed
can be sold abroad for large sums of money. “There is a huge difference between
the sustainable use of wildlife by a Zimbabwean farmer who kills an antelope for
his supper and the trading of elephant tusks via international ivory barons with
million-dollar businesses,” says Suzie Watts of the London-based Environmental
Investigation Agency. “If an illegal ivory trade is flourishing out of Zimbabwe
now, how much worse will it be if the ban is lifted? It will almost certainly
encourage more poaching across Africa because a legal trade route will have been
±đ˛őłŮ˛ą˛ú±ôľ±˛őłó±đ»ĺ.”

Stephen Cobb, an international wildlife management consultant based in
Oxford, says the problems in Zimbabwe pose a dilemma for Western governments.
“My prediction is that there will be little vociferous support now for the ivory
trade proposals because the evidence is just not there that it will work. But
Western governments will still want to demonstrate that they are in favour of
the economic development of wildlife, so some kind of compromise will have to be
worked out.”

Whatever the final CITES report says, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia have no
intention of letting the matter drop. They argue that, with southern Africa’s
elephant population now over 150 000 and rising, there is no scientific
rationale for keeping these animals on the CITES Appendix 1 listing of
endangered species, a categorisation which bans all international trade. And
they have recently found a new ally in South Africa, which last month submitted
a proposal to CITES to sell part of its stockpile of rhinoceros horn to raise
funds for conservation.

“In southern Africa, the bottom line is that elephants are fundamentally in
conflict with man and we have too many of them,” says Jon Hutton, project
manager of the Africa Resources Trust in Harare. “Elephants need to pay their
way if they are not to be pushed back by agriculture and livestock into
restricted, protected areas. Of course, in many places they can do so through
tourism, but not everywhere. Who wants to holiday in Rwanda, for example?”

People pressure

Many people fear that any trade in ivory would encourage renewed poaching. At
a meeting last November of 31 of the 37 African states within the natural range
of elephants, senior officials from Central, East and West Africa expressed
fears that a legal trade between southern Africa and Japan could have a negative
knock-on effect across the continent. There was, however, unanimous agreement
that human population pressure was creating problems for elephant conservation
across Africa and that more resources were badly needed. And there was support
for the concept that local communities must receive revenue from trade in
wildlife projects if elephant conservation is to succeed.

If the ivory trade ban stays in place in June, what is the way forward to
peaceful coexistence between Africa’s elephants and its people? The World Wide
Fund for Nature (WWF), the world’s biggest conservation charity, is a long-time
supporter of sustainable use—including, controversially, the sale of
elephant products. But it is now developing a new initiative to break the
deadlock between supporters and enemies of ivory trading. The plan, to be
presented at the CITES meeting in Harare, involves “debt for ivory swaps”
between African and donor nations. The idea is for countries such as Britain to
reduce or pay off bilateral debts owed by individual African nations that have
large, unsaleable ivory stockpiles. In return, the African countries would
either destroy the ivory or store it away securely and indefinitely.

The aim, according to James Martin-Jones, head of conservation at WWF UK, is
“to offer a new avenue of dialogue between Africa and the West and raise revenue
without running the risks associated with trading ivory”. Southern African
governments will need a lot of persuading. The stage is set for an acrimonious
showdown in Harare in June.