Environmental Indicator Framework: Summary
Published 1 December 2025
Applies to England
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Introduction and aim
The Environmental Indicator Framework (EIF) consists of 66 indicators that help show how the environment is changing over time. It supports the statutory cycle of monitoring, planning and reporting on progress in improving the environment as established by the Environment Act (2021), as well as the assessment of policies and other interventions, including how we are delivering on international and domestic commitments.
The Environmental Indicator Framework has an important role in our longer-term understanding of the effectiveness of policies and interventions. The indicators are a systematic means of monitoring environmental change, recognising that complex natural and social systems will respond to change over a range of timescales.
The Environmental Indicator Framework:
- enables clear communication of important environmental trends in England
- provides a set of indicators which relate to all aspects of the environment and all goals within the Environmental Improvement Plan
- communicates data which give a high-level picture of the environment and how it is changing – more extensive data and indicators may be available from other sources
- is used for assessing changes in the natural environment, for example against the goals of the Environmental Improvement Plan, or in applying a natural capital approach
Background
The government published the 25 Year Environment Plan in January 2018 setting out goals for improving the environment in England. The Environment Act (2021) established the 25 Year Environment Plan as the government’s first Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP), which has since been updated in EIP23 and most recently, in EIP25.
EIP25 sets out a new plan for how the government will work with landowners, communities and businesses to deliver each of its goals for improving the environment, matched with interim targets to measure progress.
The Environmental Indicator Framework (previously known as the Outcome Indicator Framework for the 25 Year Environment Plan), was designed by drawing on advice from a wide range of experts and stakeholders and presents 66 indicators to give a comprehensive view of the environment and how it is changing. The Environmental Indicator Framework was first published in 2019 and was followed by yearly updates published to align with the EIP’s Annual Progress Reports.
Structure
The Environmental Indicator Framework is:
- to be used to show changes in the environment over the period of the Environmental Improvement Plan
- based on a natural capital framework – each indicator is assigned as a condition of, pressure on, or service/benefit from, natural capital
- designed to make best use of existing monitoring programmes
- voluntarily compliant with the Code of Practice for Statistics and some indicators are official statistics in themselves (see official statistics)
- reported showing indicators’ connections to relevant actions, commitments, targets and strategies as well as links to relevant datasets
The 66 indicators are arranged into 10 broad themes. These are topics that people will generally recognise as relating to different aspects of the environment (for example, air, water, seas and estuaries, and wildlife). Some indicators may be applicable to one or more themes but have been allocated to the most relevant.
Indicator development
Of the 66 indicators in the framework, 39 are categorised as interim. Interim indicators are not inferior to final indicators in terms of quality and/or reliability; the category is used to describe those where further development is expected to extend or improve the reporting of the indicator. Reporting interim indicators means that we can communicate data where they are available, whilst recognising that further development is necessary for the indicator to be complete. Examples of circumstances under which an indicator is considered to be interim include: data need to be extracted for England from a UK-wide dataset, additional data need to be added to the indicator, or the methods used for deriving an indicator are expected to be further developed. The specific reason why an indicator is currently presented as interim is described within the indicator descriptions. Indicators are described as ‘final’ when no further significant development is immediately expected, notwithstanding the future development of the framework as a whole.
One indicator, E7: Healthy Soils, remains in development. Detail on progress made in the development of this indicator, including a link to a progress report which includes emerging findings can be found on the indicator theme page.
Assessment
The assessment section aims to help with interpreting assessment results, allowing for easier comparison across indicators, and enabling the production of additional summary statistics. Consistent categories of change for different time periods have been assigned to all indicators which are already published in a suitable format and with sufficient historic data to enable analysis. Indicator-specific results with a supporting narrative are provided for each indicator.
Where data are available for individual indicators, an assessment of environmental change since 2018 has been undertaken, to reflect progress made since the publication of the 25 Year Environment Plan/Environmental Improvement Plan. However, it is important to note that for most indicators, the currently available time series of data points since 2018 does not yet allow for anything more than an early indication of likely change. It is expected that the ongoing annual updates of the Environmental Indicator Framework will in time allow for statistically robust assessment of changes since 2018. This will require more than 5 data points in a given indicator’s time series since 2018 to minimise the impact of year-to-year fluctuations which make it difficult to interpret a clear trend. For this reason, care should be taken to not overinterpret offered assessments for the ‘since 2018’ category, as this is not felt to be as robust an assessment as the other categories which have more datapoints informing their analysis. It is also important to note that time lags exist in the environmental responses to interventions. It is expected that the majority of indicators will require longer-term reporting (greater than 5 years) before they may be considered as showing response to policy and other actions.
There are important considerations to be aware of when interpreting results. These are highlighted in the assessment background section, which provides more detail on the aims of the assessment and the methodology employed. The assessment results section presents summaries of assessment results by each EIP25 goal. These summaries help to interpret how much change has been observed across goals and include information on potential links between indicators for different goals to indicate where there may be knock on effects.
Future development
Currently, some indicators do not cover their full intended scope, and further research is required to determine the most suitable data and methods for analysis. We expect additional indicator data to be reported in future updates.
The technologies for monitoring and assessing change in the environment are advancing rapidly and offer new cost-effective methods (for example, Earth Observations, DNA methods, citizen science / mobile apps and new sensor technologies). We will look to update indicators to reflect these developments when appropriate but will ensure the environmental parameters used for reporting indicators are consistent and so retain the trend time-series where possible.
The Environmental Indicator Framework will be kept under regular review so that it continues to be relevant and provide the best and most cost-effective ways of assessing progress. The original framework was designed to describe environmental change relevant to the 10 overarching goals of government’s inaugural 25 Year Environment Plan and subsequently EIP23. EIP25 constitutes a revised update to EIP23, and so the Environmental Indicator Framework has been aligned with EIP25 goals and statutory Environment Act targets.
Feedback and user engagement
We are interested in your feedback regarding the Environmental Indicator Framework. If you have any questions about the statistics, data sources, or metadata provided, please contact us at environmentalindicators@defra.gov.uk or complete our feedback survey.
Related publications
Our annual updates
We publish a yearly update setting out the progress we have made in improving the environment through our Environmental Improvement Plan Annual Progress Reports. These reports should be read alongside the Environmental Indicator Framework.
Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 Annual Progress Reports
Annual Progress Report, 2023 to 2024