Applying strategic health and environmental indicators and impact assessments, with the involvement of environmental and health authorities.
Better information will enable environmental quality standards and targets for environmental improvement to be established and refined. Without this, potential dangers can be underestimated or scarce resources can be misused by imposing excessively high standards. Environmental quality objectives or targets play an important part in guiding policies for environmental improvement, whether for broad policy development and monitoring or for specific purposes, such as regulation or the design of economic instruments. It is necessary to develop more specific environmental objectives or targets for different sectors of the economy.
The World Resources Institute has a project entitled 'Environmental Almanac': environmental indicators.
Much effort has gone into the search for suitable indicators for reporting purposes and hundreds have been suggested. Which are the really useful ones is still not known, nor has an aggregated group yet been selected to form the environmental equivalent of the Human Development Index.