In the past few years, especially the European Commission has attempted to create a indicator that would be greener than the Gross Domestic Product that emphasizes excessively on the economic progress of a nation1. Such an observation warns that the GDP indicator, used for so many years, is probably becoming outdated. In 2005, five years after having launched the EU Lisbon strategy, there was a need to make some adjustments and adapt tools to a changing world. Actually Rui Baleiras, State Secretary for Regional Development in Portugal, stated: "The EU framework for going beyond GDP is the renewed Lisbon strategy in which progress for economic standard performance, social cohesion and environmental sustainability"2. The Commission's ambition was to include new components to measure the wealth and well-being of countries. Its members believed that the existing indicator was not sufficient to account for sustainable economic performance.
To reach their goals, one of the elements the European Commission planned to add was an index of environmental pressure. It aimed at reflecting pollution and other harm to the environment as a whole by human beings to assess the results of environmental protection and stand out the progress (if any), which echoes green economics principles. Nevertheless, they have been confronted with difficulties in their undertaking: contrary to most environmental issues, social components are more subtle to evaluate. Molly Cato states that "the criteria are, however, problematic since some of the elements we value most are not conductive to numerical measurement"3. We will base our work on these analyses.
Victor Anderson, a British green politician, suggests that a good economic indicator should:
This above statement helps to understand what is expected from a new index as well.
Therefore our objective is to attempt to create a clear indicator taking green aspects into account, more comprehensive than the existing GDP and likely to help governments to make decisions. Then we aim to define a new tool which can help governments in making decisions in a green economics perspective.
In this research project we are going to:
The "big tool" will be inspired by the GDP itself, the green GDP, the HDI, the happy planet index, the carbon footprint and the GDH. It will take into account economic aspect but also social and human points and environmental factors.
The work in our group was divided equally. We tried to utilize everybody's individual strengths and also take into account possible weaknesses there might exist. Everybody worked as an active member in our group and we managed to work effectively both WITH the group and INDIVIDUALLY outside the class. Everybody contributed to writing and researching and everybody had their own special section to cover for the book. Also everybody took one existing "welfare"-indicator to be explained in the book.
Anaëlle was excellent secretary who wrote down the main ideas from our discussions and sent them to all group members after meetings. She also had the responsibility to write the introduction and conclusion part and she was assigned to do research of the possible former researches of our topic.
Adolfo and Dennis had the main responsibility about the economical section. After we had chosen the elements to our new tool, they made further research of them. Adolfo also had the responsibility to be the editor in our group, and he worked with that while other did other research for the project.
Marion and Charlotte were responsible for the social aspects in our work. They showed excellent skills in doing research and also in determining mathematical aspects in our project.
Rosmarie and Maija were responsible for ecological aspects in our project. They also got the roles of spokespersons offering criticism for our multiple ideas that were discussed during our group meetings. They also took the responsibilities for doing the abstract, glossary, and some checking in spelling.
All in all, we think we succeeded very well in this collaborative book making as a process.
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