Indicator Selection Criteria, Part III

OK, here's an environmental indicator selection criteria set from Down Under that I liked for its simplicity. It's from Australia's Department of the Environment and Water Resources, Australian Antarctic Division:

Indicator selection criteria

The selection criteria for environmental indicators have been adopted from State of the Environment Reporting: Framework for Australia (Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, 1994). Indicators contains only those indicators that satisfy the majority of the criteria.

Environmental indicators should:

• Serve as a robust indicator of environmental change;
• Reflect a fundamental or highly-valued aspect of the environment or an important environmental issue;
• Be either national in scope or applicable to regional environmental issues of national significance;
• Provide an early warning of potential problems;
• Be capable of being monitored to provide statistically verifiable and reproducible data that shows trends over time and, preferably, apply to a broad range of environmental regions;
• Be scientifically credible;
• Be easy to understand;
• Be monitored with relative ease;
• Be cost-effective;
• Have relevance to policy and management needs;
• Contribute to monitoring of progress towards implementing commitments in nationally important environmental policies;
• Where possible and appropriate, facilitate community involvement;
• Contribute to the fulfilment of reporting obligations under international agreements;
• Where possible and appropriate, use existing commercial and managerial indicators; and
• Where possible and appropriate, be consistent and comparable with other countries’ and State and territory indicators.