Successful plan/policy implementation requires that an appropriate and comprehensive system is in place to monitor, evaluate, review, report and reflect on implementation progress. A key aspect relates to the selection of appropriate indicators to measure this progress. Reporting on implementation progress can be concerned with performance monitoring indicators which focus on assessing the implementation of particular policies.
Whilst there is an emergent trend towards regional approaches to environmental reporting by collective groupings of local authorities, a significant amount of information that is captured by local government is in inconsistent, unrelated and varied formats. It has also been noted that there is often a paucity of available and reliable data at the regional scale.
This discussion paper identifies principles for indicator selection, as well as referencing:
1) the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Heritage’s selection criteria for State of the Environment (SoE) reporting as a useful framework for developing regional indicators;
2) The SEQ State of the Region Sustainability Indicators Baseline Review 2006, (Queensland Government and CoM SEQ, 2006) which identified preliminary indicators for monitoring the regional landscape policies of the SEQ Regional Plan, which could be adapted as potential indicators for the long term monitoring of changes to the regional landscape of SEQ.