Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators

Historically Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) was the name of a Government of Canada program that provides data and information to track Canada's performance on environmental sustainability issues including climate change and air quality, water quality and availability, and protecting nature.

Designed to be relevant to the Government's policy, the indicators are built on rigorous methodology and high quality, regularly available data from surveys and monitoring networks.

The CESI website presence ensures that national, regional, local and international trends are readily accessible and transparently presented to all Canadians through the use of graphics, explanatory text, interactive maps and downloadable data.

Indicator results are linked to their key social and economic drivers and information is provided on how the issues are influenced by consumers, businesses and governments.

The purpose of this series of sector-focused case studies was to examine available indicators from a variety of sectors and assess their ability to contribute to the measurement of adaptation actions both in terms of effectiveness and progress on implementation.

Environmental indicators provide a simple way to convey complex information on the environment, much like the gross domestic product, the consumer price index and the unemployment rate do for the economy.