For this exercise, we have randomly selected 31 United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development (UNCED) reports from the total of 145. These 31 range from highly industrialized to extremely poor, they are drawn from every world region, and they range in size and diversity from China to Jamaica.
Our survey considers the state of policy and performance in four environmental dimensions: Air, Water, Land and Living Resources. We analyze the apparent state of policy as it affects the interactions between these four environmental dimensions and five activity categories: Agriculture, Industry, Energy, Transport and the Urban Sector. Although many overlaps undoubtedly exist, we attempt to draw a separate assessment for the interaction of each activity category with each environmental dimension.
Our survey assessment uses twenty five questions to categorize the state of (i) environmental awareness; (ii) scope of policies adopted; (iii) scope of legislation enacted; (iv) control mechanisms in place; and (v) the degree of success in implementation. The status in each category is graded "High, Medium, Low," with assigned values of 2, 1 and 0 respectively. For each UNCED country report, all twenty-five questions are answered for each element of the matrix in Table 1. With 20 elements in the matrix, 500 assessment scores are developed for each country.