Vehicle CO2 Emissions in Japan

This is interesting -- it's a map of vehicle CO2 emissions by municipality in Japan.


Here's how they calculate the data:

The CO2 vehicle emissions shown on the map use estimated emissions figures by municipalities nationwide, calculated using an estimation method by NIES based on the Origin-Destination Survey data of 1999 and 2005 road traffic censuses. Clicking on the map for "emissions per person" reveals figures for calculated annual emission volumes from passenger cars, freight vehicles, and the total number of vehicles. The same information is shown for "total emissions."

More information can be found here:

http://www-gis5.nies.go.jp/carco2/co2_main.php (Available in Japanese only)

The National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) official website
http://www.nies.go.jp/index.html

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Community Indicators: Citizen Scientists

I like the trend highlighted in this report from CNN's SciTech blog -- everyday people contributing to data collection. John Sutter calls it the "democratization of science" -- people capturing photos of wildlife, entering GPS locations of animals found, recording bird migrations -- all adding to a much broader scientific picture. It's the same message we've been trumpeting about data openness -- except it's headed the other way, with ordinary citizens providing information that scales upward.

This brings data sharing full circle, and I like it. See how you can be involved with this list of citizen scientist opportunities. I think we as community indicators practitioners ought to be paying attention to this trend, and with the right kind of framework/schema, we can be haviing more and more citizen-generated data aggregating upward to tell us much more about our communities, states, and the country we live in.

If you have experience in citizen-created data collection, please share!

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Sustainability Indicators in New Zealand

Check out this summary of a gathering in New Zealand to promote the use of sustainability indicators.

From Rendt Gorter:

The use of sustainability indicators to measure the ‘quality of life’ - Accounting for multiple perspectives

There is growing interest in sustainability indicators by a wide range of thinkers and practitioners. That much was evident from the introductions of participants at a one-day course convened by the Society for Sustainability Engineering and Science.

A need for better understanding about the application and reporting of indicators was stressed by council workers, the quality of indicators in environmental reporting was important to Ministry of Environment staff, researchers expressed interest in effective processes for developing indicators, and practising engineers and architects from the private sector talked of their role in improving sustainable practices and their encounters with divergent standards and languages of government partners. In response to such expectations the facilitators of the workshop – David Kettle and Dave Breuer of Anew NZ – presented an introduction to the complexities of using indicators for planning and administration of government policy. The workshop had been prepared to provide working knowledge of this subject and to stimulate debate. Sure enough, the discussion this generated showed some of the wider issues that the development of indicators must struggle with.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Environment and Public Health Indicators

A new study, Tracking Health and the Environment: A Pilot Test of Environmental Public Health Indicators looks at the relationship between environmental indicators and public health measures. In the study, the Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Environmental Public Health Tracking assembled three sets of indicators to test the relationships.

From the abstract:

To advance the use of indicators, the Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Environmental Public Health Tracking piloted three pairs of indicators: 1) air toxics and leukemia in New Jersey, 2) mercury emissions and fish advisories in the United States, and 3) urban sprawl and obesity in New Jersey. These analyses illustrate the feasibility of creating environmental hazard, exposure, and health outcome indicators, examining their temporal and geographic trends, and identifying their temporal and geographic relationships. They also show the importance of including appropriate caveats with the findings. The authors' investigations demonstrate how existing environmental health data can be used to create meaningful indicator measures to further the understanding of environment-related diseases and to help prioritize and guide interventions. Indicators are the foundation of environmental public health tracking, and increased use and development of them are necessary for the establishment of a nationwide tracking network capable of linking environmental exposures and health outcomes.

Not surprisingly, I like the idea of wider use of indicators to understand trends and relationships. I also like the idea of trying to get outside of a single-field area of focus to look at the broader set of indicators to see the interrelationships.

This is an important step, but I suspect only a first step. As the work progresses, I would like to see greater studies on how public policy decision-making about land use and transportation planning, for example, or social service provisions, or economic development policy affect both environmental and public health indicators.

The message that community indicators practitioners understand instinctively and are trying to share with the world is that we live in an interconnected system where our actions have consequences. Only a comprehensive look at indicators of the quality of life in a community has a chance to understand where we are making progress, where we struggle, and how our decisions affect the future of our community.

Here's how the authors conclude their study:

Several lessons can be drawn from the development of the indicators presented in this paper. First, indicator development is restricted by the availability, reliability, and consistency of data. Second, multidisciplinary expertise and collaboration are needed to design and track indicators that will be useful for policy. Finally, because indicator projects may not be controlled studies, their results are often difficult to interpret. Great care must be taken in the communication of findings about environmental exposure and disease relationships to the public. Words should be carefully chosen, caveats should be highlighted and repeated, and clear legends should be placed on every graphic. For linkage indicators examining both hazard/exposure and outcomes, it must be emphasized that conjunction or lack thereof provides only exploratory and potentially suggestive data about distributions and trends. Controlled analyses are generally needed to draw firmer conclusions.

Read over the study, and keep forwarding these kinds of articles!

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