One point should be stressed is that the overseas study of the measurement of sustainable development got much power from the development of indicators of social development which began in 1960s.Now the indicators and/or indices of sustainable development already promoted abroad can be classified as following four categories:(1)Pressure-state-response indicators which mainly fit for micro-systems . The distance between current or predicted physical state indicators and reference standards which are equated to sustainability can be used to indicate the sustainability of ecological system under the pressure of human activity.(2)Indices such as green GNP and National Wealth Index that take the integrated accounting of population, resources, environment and economy as their prerequisite.(3)Sustainable development indicator system which separately select economic, social and ecological indicators for measuring the state of economy, society and ecological system, and aggregate those indicators into an index with an indexing and weighting method.(4)Unsustainability indicators which define the reverse of sustainability.