ABSTRACT
There is a growing need for a coherent state-of-the-environment (SoE) reporting system capable of linking decisions made at the global, national and local levels. World wide, uncertainty prevails about the extent of environmental and social improvement or decline resulting from current approaches to ecologically sustainable development. Global conventions, national policies and local programmes are all equally dependent on continual accurate feedback from a sum of their individual localities. Borrowing a phrase from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), there is a need to ground-truth policies and practices by checking them out at the local level. Growing use of the pressure-stateresponse monitoring framework (see p. 143) by OECD nations and many of their subregions and localities has encouraged progress in collecting compatible information, which is useful to decision makers, working mainly from the top down.
