Proceedings of the IFC Satellite Seminar on "Sustainability data issues and central banks' experience", co-organised by De Nederlandsche Bank and the Irving Fisher Committee (IFC) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 4 October 2025.
Modern societies face important sustainability issues, spanning economic and financial considerations as well as an increasing range of environmental, social and governance aspects. Sustainability is a broad, evolving and multidimensional concept, which can be typically defined as the capacity to satisfy the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Its growing relevance nationally and globally has sharpened the demand for adequate data and measurement frameworks, going beyond traditional economic and financial indicators that are already well established in the current statistical apparatus.
The interest of many central banks for sustainability indicators has expanded over time to support their various responsibilities, from monetary policy and financial stability analysis to statistics, supervision, regulation, reserve management and payment oversight. As data users, they often rely on available information to inform their policies, in particular through environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. As data producers, they increasingly compile novel or experimental indicators related to sustainability, often as a complement to other statistical authorities that serve as the primary providers. Central banks’ focus has been in particular on sustainable finance – that is, financial activities that improve the condition of the environment or society or governance practices – and green finance – which focuses on environment-related aspects specifically.
Despite the active policy demand for better and more insights on sustainability, important information gaps persist. First, measuring sustainability is complex because it combines various quantitative and qualitative dimensions and trade-offs that evolve with social expectations, policy priorities and scientific advances. Second, assessing the sustainability of well-being calls for measuring a wide range of resources, ranging from economic to non-economic types of capital, such as human, social and natural. Third, information in this area is often incomplete, heterogeneous, insufficiently granular, difficult to compare, dependent on modelled estimates or costly to access. In practice, this requires increasingly sophisticated techniques to integrate innovative and various data sources and types, including text, imagery and geospatial information.
Addressing these issues requires further active efforts to improve the quality of sustainability statistics, especially in terms of relevance, availability and accessibility, reliability and comparability. First, the data should be relevant and “fit for purpose” to answer defined policy questions as well as other user demands. Second, availability and accessibility are key to supporting analysis in a timely, sufficiently granular and accessible way. Third, compiled indicators must be reliable and adhere to the widely recognised scientific and ethical standards guiding official statistics, not least to ensure their integrity, objectivity and independence. Fourth, while available data are often grounded on local and disparate frameworks, most sustainability issues have a global nature, calling for better cross-border comparability, including through harmonised concepts and indicators. Ultimately, this calls for supporting coordination among the various stakeholders involved as well as adequate governance mechanisms, leveraging the longstanding experience of central banks and official statisticians in adhering to high-quality information standards and providing actionable and evidence-based insights for policy.
Several international statistical initiatives are underway to promote harmonised collection and dissemination of sustainability indicators. Ambitious global work plans have already been designed, including the G20 Data Gaps Initiative (DGI), updates to key international statistical standards and, more broadly, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN). Additionally, progress will require expanding data collections, leveraging innovative data sources, types and techniques, implementing global information standards and, perhaps more significantly, allocating additional resources to support national and global statistical capacity. Central banks, along with other financial authorities and international organisations, will continue to play an important role in this agenda by helping to both produce and use sustainability data, helping to secure the provision of high quality reference information to better inform policymakers and the public at large.