All combined or “synthetic” measures which try to measure environmental and economic changes in one indicator can be dismissed as over-simplistic. Beyond this, however, there is also the serious question of how meaningful it is to try to produce an estimate of national sustainability rather than assess the benefits and impacts of particular activities within a country. Dealing with environmental issues at a high level of aggregation which produces a single, snapshot figure may well distract attention from the most pressing problems and conflicts which need to be the subject of political discussion. 18 Genuine savings calculations cannot tackle broader.
