Study Report - Implementation of the ESGAP Scoreboard in New Caledonia

Tuesday 9 March 2021

Authors : Adrien Comte [1], [2], Clément Surun [3], Harold Levrel [4], [5].

Summary: Actors responsible for implementing public development and environmental protection policies need to monitor the state of the environment in order to assess the effectiveness of their actions, prioritise policies and management measures, and thus objectively establish their contribution to the conservation of biodiversity and natural capital.
 ESGAP (Environmental Sustainability GAP) is a synthetic indicator based on a scoreboard that makes it possible to monitor the state of the environment from a strong sustainability perspective, i.e. by adopting demanding criteria concerning the non-substitutability of natural capital by other forms of capital (physical among others) in a territory or country. It makes it possible to provide information on changes in the functional state of different components of the environment, emphasising the gaps that exist between these changes and the objectives of maintaining or achieving "good environmental status" for each of these components.
 The indicators used to inform the ESGAP are associated with 4 themes (called
"The main ’functions’ in the ESGAP framework are: sustainable use of natural resources (1), critical pollution load of ecosystems (2), biodiversity (3), and human health and well-being (4).

Two quantitative composite indicators are used to measure the ESGAP:
 a composite indicator called SES (Strong Environmental Sustainability) which reflects the level of good environmental status to be maintained - or to be achieved - in relation to objectives defined by science, law or public policy;
 a composite indicator called SESP (Strong Environmental Sustainability Progress) which measures the gap between the current trajectory and the sustainable trajectory of evolution of the indicators in relation to the environmental objectives mentioned in the SES.

Supported by AFD and WWF France, this pilot project to implement the ESGAP dashboard in New Caledonia aims to assess the operationality of this tool in territories where data on the state of the environment and the pressures on it are often fragmented. This assessment was carried out by the Ecological Accounting Chair, hosted by CIRED and AgroParisTech. This study is part of a series of experiments carried out on several sites, particularly in Europe, and carried out mainly by a team from University College London [6]

>Read the report
>>Executive summary of the study