Measuring Conditions and Progress

About the Border Indicators Task Force

Background

The Border 2012 program mandates the development and use of indicators to measure real and meaningful results. In order to ensure that this goal is met and to improve overall capacity to respond to environmental and health problems at the border, the Border 2012 program established the Border Indicators Task Force (BITF) at the National Coordinators Meeting in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in December 2003.

The Role of the BITF

The BITF collaborates with all Border 2012 coordinating bodies (regional and border-wide workgroups, policy fora and local taskforces) to generate and use objective indicators that measure program progress and assess changes in the region’s environmental conditions. This coordinated effort will ensure that the Program “achieve[s] concrete and measurable results while maintaining a long term vision.” Ongoing review of these indicators will provide local communities, partners, and decision-makers with informative tools that can help shape research and public health and environmental policy priorities.

Strategy for Indicator Development

This report guides Border 2012 coordinating bodies in the identification, development, and use of a set of environmental and performance indicators. The strategy outlines a six-step indicator development process, which includes the

identification of a conceptual framework,
Driving forces-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) See graphic and description,
ranked criteria for indicator selection,
and a context for understanding border indicators.

The Border Indicators Task Force and the Environmental Health Work Group published the Border 2012 Strategy for Indicator Development in April 2006. English (PDF) (23 pp, 248K)| en Español (PDF) (23 pp, 360K)

Meetings

The BITF met for the first time (via conference call) in January 2004 to define task force guidelines and identify near term tasks. The following month, the BITF met in Laredo, Texas and again in May 2004 in El Paso, Texas for initial work on environmental health indicators. Through regular monthly conference calls, initiated in October 2004, and meetings in October 2004 (Tijuana, Mexico), December 2004 (Washington, DC) and February 2005 (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with the Environmental Health Workgroup), the BITF undertook its core work on an indicators strategy – Strategy for Indicator Development - and inventory of border indicators, both of which laid the foundation for the first indicators report under the Border 2012 program – State of the Border Region 2005 (PDF) (24pp, 1.7M).

Conceptual Framework of the Border Region System

Driving forces-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR Framework)

See the Border 2012 Strategy for Indicator Development (PDF) (23 pp, 250K) report for a complete description of the DPSIR framework.

Graphic of Driving forces-Pressure-State-Impact-Response

Indicators	Interactions
Driving Forces	Driving Forces are socio-economic factors that cause or influence environmental change which positively or negatively influence pressures on the environment. Common examples of Driving Forces are income, population size and make-up, use of resources, and education levels (e.g., per capita income, number of inhabitants, or household energy consumption).
Pressures	Pressures are natural or anthropogenic factors that directly influence the state of the environment. As the OECD describes, Pressures “change [the environment’s] quality and quantity of natural resources.” Common examples are the level of output from sources and the amount of resource loss (e.g., the number of carbon dioxide-emitting vehicles on the road, the amount of effluent released from point-sources into rivers, or the amount of forest harvested).
State	State refers to measures of the quality of the environment and the quantity of natural resources, as influenced by Pressures. A typical example is the concentration of a particular pollutant in a medium (e.g., concentration of ozone-damaging pollutant in the air or count of fecal coliform in water).
Impacts	Impacts are the results of the condition of the environment on people, animals, and ecological processes. For health-based environmental indicators, Impacts can be further separated into both Exposure and Effect. A common example is exposure to environmental contaminants in biological populations (e.g., incidence of gastrointestinal disease in a county).
Responses	Responses are the efforts undertaken by society to respond to environmental changes and issues. As targeted action measures, Responses are typically expressed as program activities (e.g., number of farm workers trained on pesticide risks or stricter laws for wastewater discharge).

Contact the Border Indicators Task Force Co-Chairs

You will need Adobe Reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's PDF page to learn more about PDF, and for a link to the free Adobe Reader.

Top of page