Environmental information for all : The need of a monthly index

Abstract Society is not well served by existing sources of environmental information. Although reasonable comprehensive, they are not easy to use. Several recent reports have highlighted the need to devise new ways of reporting the state of the environment. This article introduces a monthly Environmental Index, similar in form to the Retail Price Index, and designed to compete with economic statistics for attention in the media. It gives some suggestions for the components of the Index, and proposes a weighting method, as a basis for discussion.