Thoughts on measurement and metrology for global sustainablility

What are we measuring for?

This aim statement comes from the 1987 Brundtland Report,[1] one of the foundational documents in global sustainability policy. Going beyond this rather diffusely expressed aspiration, the report highlights the various social, technological and administrative systems that need to work together in order that the world’s development can be sustainable now and into the future. Harmonious outcomes depend on fostering sustainable patterns of trade and finance, effective decision-making and innovation systems that can be trusted, an infrastructure for research and technology as a precondition for cooperation, and production systems that preserve the ecological base for development. In all of these contexts, metrology plays a vital role in enabling societies to work concretely towards sustainability for people and planet.

Harmony between humanity and nature

In the decades since the Brundtland Report, international scientific assessments have meticulously reported on the drivers and impacts of unharmonious relations between humanity and nature. The periodic assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are arguably the best known and most institutionalized. Already in 1990, the IPCC reported that measured global warming had reached 0.3 ºC to 0.6 ºC over the previous century – and observed that the challenges of harmonizing different measurement records at that time limited the understanding of patterns of climate change, and contributed to uncertainty in attribution of the human-caused contribution to warming.[2] A similar scale of worldwide collaborative scientific effort now underpins the reports of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Its first global report, published in 2019,[3] highlighted that across most of the world, human activities have altered nature in such a way that most indicators of ecosystems and biodiversity show rapid decline. Here too, the scientific community notes that measurement presents challenges to collective understanding and concerted action. Assessment of the state of the world’s ecosystems relies on a variety of single and composite indicators, where the choices of what is measured, how, by whom, and to what formal or normative standards remain a matter for intense debate.

The challenge of ensuring that the world’s societies can be confident in the information provided in such assessments can be seen largely as a matter for scientific metrology. Seen from the scientific perspective, more and more fundamental measurements are making up a detailed picture of global environmental changes. Apart from the international initiatives to tackle climate change and the threats to biological diversity, many other international science and policy contexts rely on coordinated measurement for detecting, monitoring and reporting on environmental changes, and for assessing the effects of human actions, both in driving unsustainable outcomes and in implementing mitigation efforts to prevent the harms and reduce the risks. Good measurement is essential for the scientific understanding and societal responses to the pollution of air, water and soils, the systemic implications of land and water use, and the exploitation of the world’s other natural resources.

At the same time, further developments are still needed in measurement techniques, instruments and institutions supporting the scientific understanding of the global environment. For example, basic physicochemical measurements underpin today’s knowledge of the relationships between greenhouse gas concentrations, the changing temperature of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, and the shifting dynamics of the overall energy balance of the planet. Major efforts have gone into harmonization and coordination of the global networks for this kind of data collection, and yet there are still stark geographical gaps, including in the regions of the world that are projected to be most directly impacted by changing climate. Long time-series data collection is also needed to understand and predict environmental changes. This requires methodological consistency over time, and yet it must also be responsive to today’s changing biophysical conditions as well as to emerging sustainability concerns. An example is nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas and ozone depleting substance. In a sense, it has slipped through regulatory gaps: as a relatively unreactive gas in the troposphere, it was not included in the acid rain and clean air regulations of the 1980s and 1990s, and as a substance with multiple natural and human-driven sources it remains only loosely covered (i.e., under non-binding guidance) in the Montreal Protocol and the Paris Agreement on climate. The scientific community is calling for a global N₂O network for consistent measurement across time, geographic space and ecological contexts,[4] to support the needs of climate mitigation and sustainability policy. The most recent IOC-UNESCO State of the Oceans report highlights serious shortcomings in basic measurement not just for nitrogen species but also phosphorus, pH, and even ocean temperature.^[5]

The mitigation of environmental harms and the protection of the living world can only be assured on the basis of accurate and reliable environmental measurements. To support this global effort, sustainability science depends on available and consistent data obtained from many disciplines. Routine aspects of quality infrastructure, such as standardization, laboratory accreditation and intercomparisons, can be a challenge when measurement instruments are being progressively developed and when analysis is necessarily taking place in the field (or in aircraft and on ships).[6] Nevertheless, the work of defining, developing and deploying measurement units and discipline-bridging standards is essential for ensuring traceable, verifiable measurement. This leads us into the domains of applied metrology, which assures confidence in the measurements that are made, both in research contexts and in wider society, and legal metrology, which ensures that measurement and measurements comply with legal requirements within national jurisdictions and internationally.

Metrology is thus a key part of the infratechnology of the knowledge systems of sustainability science, with tight links to the data infrastructures of global change science and environmental policy implementation. Metrology – thinking about what our measurements actually measure – enables clear linkage of these activities back to primary standards and measurement units. And yet it is not often prominently discussed in the contributory research communities. It is an enduring challenge for higher education, research, and continuing professional development to ensure that robust enough training is provided in metrology and quality infrastructure for sustainability, by which I broadly mean the interacting bodies and institutions of metrology, standards, certification and accreditation, and quality management in the various public and private organizations that are working – or being regulated! – towards a sustainable world.

Harmony among human beings

The 2030 Agenda highlights prosperity, peace and partnership as essential for ensuring harmonious and sustainable relations between people and planet, and among the peoples of the world. In today’s globalized world, the impacts and risks of unsustainability are driven mainly by the behaviors of the richest and most industrialized societies, and affect the poorest and historically exploited peoples the most. Sustainability hinges on fairness in trade, justice in the transition, and accountability, transparency and resilience in the joint and collective efforts to achieve globally agreed commitments and goals.

The challenge of ensuring that trade is fair, benefits of natural resource use are justly shared, and that the routine measurement that supports so much of societal interaction really is reliable, accurate, trustworthy (‘good’ measurement, in short) can be seen as the domain of legal and applied metrology.

In a globalized world, the distinctions between national and international trade seem to blur. All trade increasingly requires conformity with standards and specifications, together with mutual recognition of testing and inspection, if it is to make any claims regarding sustainability at all. In Europe, the Green Deal sets out to protect consumer and business interests, and assure environmental and human health and wellbeing protections along the full value chain. Metrology provides the data foundations for sustainability baselines and targets in this context. Efforts to ground basic measures in fundamental (SI) constants are being made for many aspects of human health, safety, and consumer protection, as well as for metering household utilities. These span from individual to large scale application contexts, extending from the relatively straightforward physical measures (as used for energy, water and carbon) to the complex footprints of technology, industry and even personal consumption behaviours.

The idea of ‘fair measurement for all’ has become a matter of international equity, and yet it raises some dilemmas. In the contexts of trade and benefit-sharing (including in the framework of the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biological Diversity[7]) , inequity can arise from differential access to reference materials and testing and calibration services.  At the same time the shortcomings of basic measurement and measurements in places of weak regulation, inadequate enforcement, and even intentionally exploitative systems are very well known.[8]

In a spirit of partnership, in line with Sustainable Development Goal 17 (https://globalgoals.org/goals/17-partnerships-for-the-goals), the economic, financial, political and technological hegemonies that underpin unsustainable development need systemic transformation, and capacity building that involves governments, business and civil society.  With this in mind, fundamental (scientific), applied and legal metrology must all meet and be coordinated if their respective functions, responsibilities, and understandings are really to inform action towards sustainability.

So much quantification, but what is really measured?

Metrology plays a vital role in informing and supporting sustainability science-policy-society interfaces – the spaces where knowledge is brought together to inform policymaking and action. In recent decades, these interfaces have evolved. When the Brundtland Report was written, its messages for global governance for sustainability were directed at national governments and multilateral institutions. Today, business is explicitly involved as a key actor in the 2030 Agenda, the global biodiversity framework and climate governance. Specifically, big business and transnational corporations operate both as technical experts and as interest-holders, shaping the design of policies and implementation plans and promoting market-based and voluntarist approaches.[9] A dynamic outcome is that market standards emerge beyond the international system of private standards and certification. The transparency of information and of process may be eroded. At worst, powerful big business may end up co-opting more of the processes of standard setting and regulation in ways that fall short on accountability, public interest and public value.

Those of us who operate in sustainability science-policy-business interfaces are seeing more and more metrics for sustainability, but in many contexts it is getting harder  to see the connection to good measurement. In the climate context, the first IPCC report and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were unambiguous that avoiding dangerous climate change depends on cutting human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Under the Paris Agreement,[10] countries commit to prepare nationally determined contributions that they ‘intend to achieve’, so that global emissions peak ‘as soon as possible’. The underlying idea was that countries can compare their efforts with each other and hold each other politically accountable in adaptive and responsive ways. And yet the Paris Agreement frames policy and action within a much less firmly articulated objective, so concrete accountability becomes more elusive and the underpinning measurements tend to slip away from robust metrology.

We also see that assumptions are made about the translatability of environmental metrics among each other and with economic metrics, in processes of climate and biodiversity offsetting, ‘net-zero’ calculations, monetization,  and so on. The line that decision-makers need a number is given as a rationale for mashups of indicators into single ‘metrics’ that hide rather than reveal  essential  information about variability, uncertainties, and data sources and availability.

Closing thoughts

A concern is that these evolutions in the action-shaping interfaces of global sustainability result in deflection from the necessary actions by the key actors, displacement of efforts, and prolonged  inaction.

A challenge in these changing times is to ensure that metrology – the science and rigorous habit of thinking about what measurement measures, and how and why – remains at the heart of sustainability measurement. Metrology underpins the scientific assessments that track today’s sustainability challenges, the necessary technological innovations for a just transition and their diffusion into societal application contexts, and the technical cooperation and trade needed to mitigate and adapt to a changing living world.

Many have noted that metrology has many traits of a public good: when it works well, it is largely invisible in everyday contexts, and this means there is a tendency at national level for underinvestment in its structures. It is not given high prioritisation in education, training and the public discourse.  In these times where sustainability governance depends critically on concerted efforts by public, private and individual spheres of society, a joined-up measurement infrastructure and quality system[11] requires scientific, applied and legal metrology to inform each other, keep pace with each other, and provide the mutual checks, balances and innovative impetus so that the system at large can be resilient to change. Deeper coordination and wider communication are needed to equip the world’s societies to live in harmony with each other and with nature.

References

[1]  World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future – ‘The Brundtland Report’ A/42/427. Chapter 2: The concept of Sustainable Development. www.un-­‐documents.net/ocf-­‐02.htm

[2] IPCC (1990 / 1992) Climate Change: The IPCC First Assessment Report Overview and Policymaker Summaries and 1992 IPCC Supplement. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch/report/climate-change-the-ipcc-1990-and-1992-assessments.

[3]  IPBES (2019): Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E.S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H.T. Ngo (editors). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. 1148 pages. www.ipbes.net/global-assessment

[4]  Tian, H. et al (2024) Global nitrous oxide budget (1980-2020) Earth System Science Data, 16: 2543–2604.

[5]  IOC-UNESCO (2024) State of the Ocean Report. International Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, Paris. IOC Technical Series, 190. https://doi.org/10.25607/4wbg-d349

[6]  Cornell, S. and Downing, A. (2014) Environment, absolute? The quality infrastructure of the planetary boundaries. A Discussion Paper for the Physikalisch-­Technische Bundesanstalt. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Available at https://doi.org/10.31223/X50P6K

[7]  Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2011) Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity. www.cbd.int/abs/doc/protocol/nagoya-protocol-en.pdf

[8]  World Bank (2025). World Development Report 2025: Standards for Development. World Bank, Washington DC, USA. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-2275-9, CC-BY-3.0 IGO.

[9] Chen, I-C. (2025) From carbon emissions, data privacy, to self-driving: how transnational corporations shape global technical standards and governance. Indiana International & Comparative Law Review 35(3) 295-342

[10] UNFCCC (2015) Paris Agreement. https://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf

[11] Brown, R.J.C. (2021) Measuring measurement – What is metrology and why does it matter? Measurement 168: 108408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2020.108408