Industrial environmental performance cannot be influenced or managed if it cannot be measured. Environmental performance indicators give companies the tools to gauge their progress against corporate environmental objectives and benchmark their performance against competitors and government regulations. They also provide policy makers with more meaningful information on corporate environmental performance for policy decision making. Many forward-looking companies already recognize the need to better manage the environmental impacts of their activities. At the same time, to an increasing degree, regulators, communities, investors, and customers are demanding more meaningful information on corporate environmental performance. While these diverse audiences share a common interest in performance, there is no consensus on how to measure it. To be effective, a common "language"�as reflected in a commonly accepted set of metrics that is universally adopted and understood by all stakeholders�is needed.

What is US-AEP doing to advance industrial environmental performance measurements?

In 1997, US-AEP entered into a one-year agreement with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to explore the U.S. experience with environmental performance measures and indicators and suggest directions for further work at both the corporate and public policy levels. NAE established a blue-ribbon panel of U.S. experts, drawn from the corporate, academic, and nongovernmental sectors to assess the state of the art of environmental performance of key U.S. industries: chemical, electronic, automotive and pulp and paper.

Subsequently, the NAE study was endorsed by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) at the International Standards and Technology Working Group meeting in Singapore in October 1997, and has been embraced as a component of APEC's new Cleaner Production Strategy. Since the APEC endorsement, eleven APEC economies�Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, People�s Republic of China, Singapore, Taipei, and Thailand�have announced that they have launched parallel studies of their key industries which also include the housing construction, textile, and food processing sectors.