EUROSTAT has commissioned a consortium led by the WU Vienna and including the Ecologic Institute, INFRAS and Haymarket to develop two publications on the EU sustainable development indicators. The consortium will produce a manual for the SDS indicators aiming to explain the indicators to potential users and a guide that will be used to advertise the SDS indicators to a lay audience at the Rio+20 summit.

EUROSTAT, in conjunction with an expert group, has developed a set of over 100 sustainability indicators, and since 2005 this indicator set has been maintained and used to measure the EU’s progress towards the targets of the sustainability strategy. Since 2005, the indicators have been updated and changed in response to new political challenges.

The manual will provide a reference work for users of the SDS indicators that will include a description and a quality assessment of each indicator. The reader will be able to understand the data source and the assumptions taken, the most important pitfalls of interpretation, and the role of the indicator within the framework of SDS indicators.

The second publication, the guide to the SDS indicators, aims to provide an introduction to a lay audience at the Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. The guide will  bring the sustainability indicators to life by creating stories that put a range of indicators into a practical context.