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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 March 1999 Issue No. 419 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 March 1999 Issue No. 419
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Waste watch
THE CENTRE for the Study of Developing Countries (CSDC), an affiliate of Cairo University, held a workshop last week to study the Material Flow Account (MFA) as an important measure of environmental performance in the economy. The workshop was jointly organised by CSDC and the German foundation, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.According to Alia El-Mahdi, deputy director of CSDC, who presented a research paper on the MFA, the increasing preoccupation with environmental safety has been translated into a vigorous search for suitable indicators which would assist in revealing the state of environmental conditions, both inside countries and comparatively between countries.
The MFA approach is based on the premise that economies, in their pursuit of growth, can affect the surrounding environment in two ways. "First, materials are extracted from scarce natural resources, thereby depleting reserves and limiting future potentials. Second, wastes and pollutants are released into the environment as by-products of the different human and economic activities," El-Mahdi said.
She added that "conventional indicators, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), do not reflect the magnitude of movement or processing of the large quantities of materials used in production. The MFA could be considered as a parallel to traditional economic accounting since it gives a detailed understanding of the environmental consequences of economic activity."
El-Mahdi stressed the importance of establishing an environmental database for collecting the necessary information for the MFA. This database could be developed and expanded to become more comprehensive and useful to analysts, administrators, and decision-makers in the environmental field.
The workshop was attended by economy professors and other experts.
