local Bhutanese culture. The Bhutan GNH philosophy was initially dismissed due to its generality and was considered as touchy-feely concept, but later taken seriously after it published an econometric framework. Beyond GDP In 2007, the European Commission, the European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD and WWF hosted a conference titled "Beyond GDP". The consensus was to widen measures of economic growth and come up with measures that can inform policy making. The conference was attended by over 650 policy makers, experts and social activists. Spurred by its success the European Union released a communication titled GDP and beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world that identified five actions to improve the indicators of progress in ways that make it more responsive to the concerns of its citizens: Complementing GDP with highly aggregated environmental and social indicators Near real-time information for decision-making More accurate reporting on distribution and inequalities Developing a European sustainable development scoreboard Extending national accounts to environmental and social issues. Following this communication and its adoption by the European Parliament in June 2008, many European governments and policy makers have started work on developing new measures of economic development. In August 2013, the European Commission published the Staff Working Document on "Progress on 'GDP and beyond' actions" , in which reviews what had been achieved on the five steps identified in the communication GDP and beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world. Some of the most significant actions taken include: The European Statistical System adopted the first set of indicators on 'quality of life and well-being' and it also decided for the EU-SILC (EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) to be the core instrument for building up such indicators. The time taken to publish key environmental indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions has been shortened by as much as eight months by using advanced statistical methods to arrive at so-called 'early estimates', which have proven to be sufficiently accurate to inform policy decisions. Since 2012, Eurostat has produced 'early estimates'—within four months—for CO2 emissions from energy use. A consensus has not been reached on the EU Sustainable Development Scoreboard. However, a preliminary scoreboard of resource efficiency indicators (REI) is currently being tested and discussed. The EU actively supported the finalisation and adoption by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) as the international statistical standard. Since 2010, European statistics have