Indicators of sustainable energy development

Abstract

The social and environmental inadequacies of conventionally defined economic growth have led to the advocacy of "sustainability" as a more appropriate goal for national development.The broad goal of "sustainable development" is not easy to translate into practical strategies. This publication follows a series on natural resource accounting prepared for the Ministry for the Environment. Natural resource accounting is an attempt to incorporate consideration of resource depletion and environmental degradation into national decision making. The most recent of these publications (Information Paper No. 26) is an examination of the feasibility of preparing energy accounts for New Zealand. Energy accounting is another approach to the problem of measuring sustainable energy development