Insights from indicators

Goal: Generate insights from indicators.

Approach:

  1. Add your indicator table from the previous step to the report. (See explanation in SCA Online Report > How to copy a table from a spreadsheet into the report)
  2. Compare your indicators to EU or national targets that they can be connected to. This gives the city a good understanding of their standing and contribution. For this you can use some of our collected benchmark values, or other values that you know of.
  3. State qualitative insights for the indicators, including answers based on the exemplary questions below. For this, generally, it is also valuable to have and analyse direct and indirect indicators in conjunction. Since indirect indicators are often given as a percentage (share), which is a value that is not indicative of the magnitude or significance of a flow, a value that is rather informed by direct indicators, both types of indicators together give each other context.
  4. Add the text to field 13 in the SCA online report form or your own report.

Questions for analysis

  • Which indicators were met?
  • How did they perform over the years?
  • Where is room for improvement?
  • What is the status of the SOs?

Outline of the video

  • There are a couple of elements that you can provide insights on. In this video, we talk about those from indicators.
  • After you have filled in Table 1 and Table 2a and your indicators have been calculated, they now need to be analysed to gain insights into the circularity of your sector.
  • Remember that there is no single indicator that tells us how circular the sector is. Instead we need several indicators to cover the multi-faceted theme of circularity and in the SCA we even only cover vision element 3 “Closing material loops and reducing harmful resource use”.
  • There are some such as the Circular Material Use Rate that might be more evocative and explicit more how circular a city is, BUT you really need the combination of all indicators.
  • Interpretation of the indicators: In order to know what an indicator value means or represents, you need to compare it to something. Either you compare it to time and show that something has increased or decreased, but you likely don’t have time nor data to make the calculations for several years.
  • Therefore, we suggest that you compare this to reference values to benchmark the indicators.
  • If you have other values, such as the recycling rate goals of your country for example, then you can use those too. Remember to state the sources for those in your report.