The Department of Environmental Protection's mission statement directs the agency to:

The Department carries out this mission through a wide range of state program strategies -- regulation, cleanup, restoration, acquisition, education, technical assistance, financing, research, and planning. In the day-to-day process of managing these pro grams, there is always the risk of focusing too closely on the programs and losing sight of the ultimate goal of protecting the environment.

When the focus is at the program level, performance is measured in terms of how well each program meets its objectives, rather than how well it serves the overall environmental mission. Both kinds of assessment are needed. One of the problems in making the link between program and mission is that there are few tools available which provide managers with the kind of information needed to make such evaluations. The SAFE document is an attempt to create a tool to serve this purpose .

SAFE is defined as:

The SAFE system was developed over the past four years by the Department as a component of its planning process. This most recent document was refined and further developed for the Department under contract with the Florida Center for Public Management at Florida State University. The reader should understand that SAFE is an evolving concept. While this document represents a great stride forward, further work is needed if the full potential of SAFE is to be realized.

This current version of SAFE is comprised of 87 indicators grouped into categories that reflect the 13 issue areas developed by the Florida Comparison of Environmental Risks (FCER) -- the Department's comparative risk assessment pr oject -- and a series of other issues of concern. These indicators were chosen for the purpose of providing a current and comprehensive snapshot of the condition of Florida's environment, a historical perspective on how the state arrived at its present s tatus, and perhaps most important, some idea as to where the state's environmental future is heading.

The original goals of the Department were to use SAFE as a tool to evaluate its success in fulfilling its environmental mission, to assess its programmatic allocation of resources, and as a public information instrument. These sho uld continue to be the major uses of SAFE. However, as the Department develops its ecosystem management initiative, a thorough review of SAFE's potential usefulness in that area should be conducted. Also, as discussed later, there are links to the Florida Comparison of Environmental Risks (FCER) which should be explored and capitalized on.

When fully developed, SAFE can provide support to a number of Department management functions. It can serve as a:

mission-level tool to provide a broad evaluation of the environmental agency's performance in protecting and managing the environment,

measurement foundation for structuring environmental goals,

basis for measuring environmental achievement and progress,

basis for making strategic budget decisions,

means of evaluating the performance of individual programs and activities,

system to monitor the health of individual ecosystems within the context of statewide environmental conditions,

factual foundation for Total Quality Leadership activities,

constituency building process,

structure around which to develop environmental education programs, and

tool for public relations and information.

In March of 1994 the Department contracted with the Florida Center for Public Management of Florida State University to take the initial draft of SAFE and produce the first complete version. This revised version of SAFE includes the following improvements:

a thorough editing of the document,

a reformatting to condense the document and to improve its visual impact,

an upgrading of the technical analysis of the indicators,

an examination of each of the indicators to determine its current utility and the deletion of indicators that did not meet standards for continued inclusion in the system,

the addition of new indicators to fill gaps in the system or where new data capable of supporting a new indicator became available,

the restructuring of the system to cluster indicators around the newly developed comparative risk assessment issues developed as part of the Florida Comparison of Environmental Risk project,

the development of new indicator groups dealing with energy, environmental justice, and state comparisons, and

the updating of the data and charts associated with each of the existing indicators.

The Department is engaged in a number of policy, planning, and management initiatives and processes designed to revitalize the way environmental policy and decisionmaking are formulated. These initiatives will fundamentally change the Department's organi zational culture. Two such initiatives of particular importance that relate closely to SAFE are discussed below -- ecosystem management and comparative risk assessment.

Ecosystem Management
With the merger of the Department of Environmental Regulation and the Department of Natural Resources into a new Department of Environmental Protection, DEP was required to begin managing the environment on an ecosystem basis. This requirement will have profound effects on how the agency organizes itself to do business and the culture of the Department. Secretary Wetherell has identified the essence of ecosystem management:

An Office of Ecosystem Management now exists within the Department and an active process involving a variety of public and private interests is underway to design how ecosystem management will work in Florida. An important part of ecosystem management, a nd one of particular relevance to SAFE, is the ongoing development of a long-term statewide monitoring network. This network, parts of which are already in place, will provide a continuing source of environmental data from which n ew indicators can be developed.

Florida Comparison of Environmental Risks
In September, 1993, the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation -- now the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) -- received funds from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a comparative risk assessment project for Florida, j oining a growing list of approximately 20 states that are in some stage of using comparative risk for environmental policymaking. The Department contracted with the Florida Center for Public Management (FCPM) of The Florida State University to conduct th e study on its behalf. FCPM began work on the project in June 1993.

Comparative risk assessment is a planning, management, and public policy tool specifically designed to assist environmental agencies at the national, state, regional, and local levels. The comparative risk assessment process:

identifies the critical environmental issues with which an organization must deal,

rigorously assembles and consolidates the best available scientific information concerning that issue,

applies a process that considers this scientific information in combination with the judgments of the best available technical experts to produce the best possible assessment of the risk that each issue poses to ecology, human health, and the quality of life,

establishes, based on these assessments of risk, relative rankings of the issues with regard to their separate risk impacts on ecology, human health, and the quality of life, and

confirms these rankings with the public by a participative public process that culminates in the development of a single integrated ranking of environmental risks.

The principal assumption behind comparative risk assessment is that environmental public policy, as reflected in the structure of environmental programs at the national, state, and local level, is not an accurate representation of the true environmental r isks to human health or ecology. Instead the issues funded through environmental programs tend to reflect concerns which have high political content, that have high public visibility, and that are particularly abhorrent. Other issues -- that are not as obvious to decision-makers and the general public, but which may represent relatively high risk to human health and the ecology -- may receive little or no attention. The result is the potential for a serious misallocation of public resources and the di stortion of environmental public policy.

Comparative risk assessment is a process that has been designed to provide the factual foundation an agency needs to redress this misallocation of resources and distortion of public policy by providing a comprehensive and consistent means of reviewing all environmental issues and determining their "true" risk to environmental values. Comparative risk assessment provides the Department with the opportunity to review its environmental priorities and adjust its resource allocations to provide Florida's citi zens the best environmental protection available.

Together these three initiatives -- SAFE, comparative risk assessment, and ecosystem management -- establish the foundation for fundamental change in the Department's policy and decisionmaking processes. Ecosystem management reori ents Department focus from dealing with relatively fragmented issues and programs to dealing with integrated approaches involving entire ecosystems. By concentrating on the ecosystem itself, the primary emphasis is placed on achieving environmental result s and there is less danger of focusing on program achievements. Similarly, comparative risk assessment will increase concern for dealing with environmental results since the prioritized issues will reflect environmental concerns based on relative risk a nd not based upon the artificial constraints of specific programs. SAFE can provide statistical support in the form of environmental indicators for specific ecosystems or for the prioritized comparative risk issues found in Florid a Comparison of Environmental Risks. This enhances the Department's ability to measure achievements in terms of environmental results.

Format and Organization
How indicators are presented in this document is an important change from the initial drafts. The original draft SAFE document grouped indicators around nine broadly constructed issues that were selected because they seemed to pro vide a convenient and comprehensive means of assembling the indicators first identified for inclusion. This revised version of SAFE restructures the indicator groupings to cluster around the environmental issues identified in the Florida Comparison of Environmental Risk project. There are several benefits to doing this.

First, since these issues should reflect the most important environmental issues facing Florida and since these issues are likely to become the focus of the Department's and other state agencies' planning efforts, there is a strong policy reason for struc turing indicators so they may measure changes in these key issues. Second, since state environmental agencies tend to define their issues to reflect their agency's program structure, the use of nonprogram issues such as those produced by a comparative risk assessment forces the search for indicators outside of the data a ssociated with individual programs. Gaps in the readily available information that can support indicators become apparent, resulting in the development of a more comprehensive and complete indicator system.

The comparative risk issues identified for use are:

Population

Alteration and loss of ecosystems,

Use and management of natural resources,

Patterns of development,

Surface water quality,

Ground water quality,

Water quantity,

Air quality,

Transportation, transfer and storage of hazardous materials and wastes,

Degradation of indoor air environment,

Contaminated food,

Loss of scenic, cultural, and historic resources, and

Soil quality.

Several other indicator groups are included in a supplementary section. They are:

Waste indicators. The decision was made during the comparative risk deliberations that hazardous and solid waste issues would be handled within each of the media-based issues. Since the Department invest s so much of its energy and resources in waste related programs, a separate collection of indicators reflecting waste activities is included.

Public perception. Similarly a series of indicators demonstrating public attitudes toward environmental concerns were included in the original draft and will now be placed in the section.

Environmental investment. The original draft included indicators that demonstrate the level of financial commitment shown in Florida to the financing of environmental programs. These indicators, since th ey do not reflect any direct environmental achievement, are provided in this section.

Environmental justice. An emerging area of increasing policy concern is the concept of environmental justice, the degree to which environmental impacts are differentially and unfairly distributed across s ocietal groups based on race, income, gender and age. Several indicators are presented demonstrating some aspects of this broad issue. Much work is left to accomplish.

Energy. Energy is a pervasive issue that, while itself not strictly environmental, is a major determinant of many environmental concerns. Key indicators of energy policy and usage are presented to help c reate a context for the other environmental measures.

State Comparisons. The newly developed indicators showing Florida's performance on several important indicators relative to other states are included.

The ability of individual indicators to provide information varies significantly. The very best indicators are those that provide direct measures of the health of humans, animals, and plants. Unfortunately, there are relatively few areas where such defi nitive, end-result kinds of measures are available. Where such quality indicators are not available other, less direct, measures must be used. The table below identifies a hierarchy of indicator quality that reflects gradations in the value received by different types of indicator data.

Data types 1 and 2 measure administrative, bureaucratic, or activity measures and are only weakly associated or completely unassociated with the capacity to measure environmental quality. Few of the indicators in SAFE are types 1 or 2 and those that do exist may be replaced by higher quality indicators.

Data types 3-6 are measures that reflect indicators of environmental performance. As the indicators progress from type 3 to type 6 the quality of environmental information increases. Ideally, all indicators should be type 6 indicators and future versio ns of SAFE should focus on improving the overall quality of the indicators in the system.

Some indicators are included that measure neither administrative concerns nor environmental issues, but instead measure closely related concerns or issues that are indirectly associated with environmental performance. These include public perception issu es (citizen's views regarding the environment) and financial investment (measures of public expenditure on the environment) The measures are coded "I" for Indirect.

In the upper right hand corner of the title box of each indicator is a small outline of Florida that is associated with a number or letter from the following table and reflects the quality level of that indicator.

SAFE is an evolving system. There will be a constant flow of new indicators entering the system as new environmental issues arise and as new and improved sources of data are established that will support acceptable indicators. Ot her indicators will leave the system as their utility diminishes or sources of data disappear. Further conceptual approaches to the development of indicators may bring additional changes. SAFE will adapt to accept these improveme nts.

The following are some of the major areas for the growth and development of SAFE that have the greatest potential for improving its future effectiveness:

Filling gaps in the current system. For a number of issue areas or major environmental dimensions, SAFE currently does not provide adequate indicators. Examples include indicators that summarize environmentally determined health impacts and indicators that sensitively measure timely changes in land use. The use of comparative risk-assessment-based issues will doubtlessly turn up environmental issues where there is no current ind icator. There are few, if any, indicators for contaminated food, indoor air, soil quality, loss of scenic, cultural, and historic resources, and the transportation, transfer, and storage of hazardous materials and wastes. Continued work is needed to fi ll out this system.

Policy or special purpose indicators. There are important areas of environmental policy that the Department may wish to be able to track trends and progress. Such areas might include:

• pollution prevention
• sustainable development
• environmental justice
• growth management

Geographic information system indicators. All of the current indicators in the SAFE system are based on a single parameter that, with a single exception, summarize statewide enviro nmental conditions. The information to support these indicators was derived from existing data that came from a number of sources and organizations. Given the limited initial funding for the development of the system and the substantial availability of existing environmental data, the strategy of using this type of data was sensible and effective as a means of making rapid progress in establishing an adequate system. While there are still some gains to be made by continuing to pursue this type of indic ator, future gains in expanding and strengthening SAFE will likely come from exploiting the power of geographic information system (GIS) technologies and data systems. In using existing single parameter data, the development of SAFE is limited to what some other entity wants to collect and portray for its own purposes. With GIS, the Department can begin to design and craft specific indicators to meet their own needs.

Regional indicators. The use of GIS technologies makes possible the development and presentation of regional indicators. There is every reason to believe that there are some regional differences in Flori da's environmental values that can get lost in indicators that summarize at the state level. Such indicators need to be developed and included in the system.

Ecosystem specific indicators and indicator systems. The Department, as discussed above, has embarked upon an ambitious effort to reorient its approach to environmental protection by focusing its attention and resources to managing entire ecosystems. Six such ecosystems have been identified for prelimina ry analysis and others will certainly follow. The Department, as it develops its plans and programs, should ensure that it has measurement systems in place to establish baseline environmental conditions for each of these ecosystems and measure change in these systems through ecosystem specific indicators.

Indicator communication and display. The development of indicator systems is plainly of value for a variety of reasons. That value, however, is diminished if the indicator information is not readily acce ssible. The publication of this document is a useful first step, but may be of limited value in making the information available in a readily accessible form to a wide number of people. Technological approaches to improving the accessibility of SAFE to a number of constituents might include:

• putting SAFE on-line within the Department's computer network,
• putting SAFE on the Internet to make it available worldwide, and
• putting SAFE on a self displaying disk or CD ROM for public distribution.

Environmental education. The Council of State Governments, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Hillsborough County, and the Hillsborough County School System, using a small environmental e ducation grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, conducted a pilot project for using environmental indicator development as the basis for a unit within a high school environmental science class. Using SAFE as a model, students worked on a environmental indicator system for their county. The project was a clear success and Hillsborough County is expanding the program to five high schools during the 94-95 school year. The potential for SAFE to be used in environmental education activities in this way and in many others is substantial.