Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Analysing the construction of the environmental sustainability index 2005

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The construction of the environmental sustainability index 2005 is investigated. The available data for the 146 countries that participated in the creation of the index are employed for establishing the degree of accuracy with which the reported (a) score and (b) ranking of each participating country, as well as its (c) clustering with the other participating countries, can be reproduced. The original methodologies used for the creation of the environmental sustainability index are replicated, with complementary parametric and nonparametric techniques implemented whenever either the original methodology has not been sufficiently specified in the relevant literature, or the replicated methodology is not found adequately accurate. Leave-one-out and tenfold cross-validation are, subsequently, performed on the set of participating countries for establishing whether (and to what degree of accuracy) the score, ranking and clustering of a novel country can be evaluated/predicted. The collective results demonstrate that a uniform means of constructing the environmental sustainability index cannot be established: an inability to accurately replicate/predict the scores is observed, with the resulting deviations causing sometimes significant departures from the reported rankings; although the original seven clusters cannot be generated, the clustering of the participating countries is found relatively consistent. A possible cause of the source of the observed deviations is proposed, namely the use of only a subset of the 146 countries for constructing the environmental sustainability index 2005.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. According to the convention introduced for the ESI (Esty et al., 2005: 2), the term “country” covers not only countries per se, but also economically/administratively independent regions and territories.

  2. For the creation of which the distance from a theoretical absolute level of ES has been used as a general guide.

  3. The data correspond to pertinent parameters of ES, which ideally extend across the three ES pillars of environment, society and economy (Adams 2006; Cato 2009).

  4. in the former case calculated by adding the indicator/component values per country and creating a single-input polynomial.

  5. Even when the predictions involving extrapolation were not taken onto account.

References

  • Adams WM (2006) The future of sustainability: re-thinking environment and development in the twenty-first century. Report of the IUCN Renowned Thinkers Meeting, 29–31 January 2006

  • Agrawal KKr, Jain S, Jain KrA, Dahiya S (2014) Assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas thermal power plants using life cycle approach. Int J Environ Sci Technol 11(4):1157–1164

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Bell S (2008) Morse S (2008) Sustainability indicators: measuring the immeasurable?, 2nd edn. Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton

    Google Scholar 

  • Bezdec JC (1981) Pattern recognition with fuzzy objective function algorithms. Plenum Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Chaves HML, Alipaz S (2007) An integrated indicator based on basin hydrology, environment, life, and policy: the watershed sustainability index. Water Resour Manag 21(5):883–895

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen CC (2009) Environmental impact assessment framework by integrating scientific analysis and subjective perception. Int J Environ Sci Technol 6(4):605–618

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Sherbinin A, Reuben A, Levy MA, Johnson L (2013) Indicators in practice: how environmental indicators are being used in policy and management contexts. epi.yale.edu/files/indicators_in_practice_2013.pdf

  • Devijver PA, Kittler J (1982) Pattern recognition: a statistical approach. Prentice-Hall, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunn JC (1973) A fuzzy relative of the ISODATA process and its use in detecting compact well-separated clusters. J Cybern 3(3):32–57

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eamer J, Russell DE, McRae L, Böhm M, Deinet S, Collen B, Gill MJ (2012) The arctic species trend index 2011: update of the ASTI, an in-depth look at marine species and development of spatial analysis techniques. CAFF Assessment Series No. 9. Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna, Iceland

  • Esty DC, Levy M, Srebotnjak T, de Sherbinin A (2005) Environmental sustainability index: benchmarking national environmental stewardship. Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, New Haven. http://www.yale.edu/esi/ESI2005_Main_Report.pdf

  • Ewers RM, Smith RJ (2007) Choice of index determines the relationship between corruption and environmental sustainability. Ecol Soc 12(1). http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/

  • Forgy EW (1965) Cluster analysis of multivariate data: efficiency versus interpretability of classifications. Biometrics 21(3):768–769

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg D (1989) Genetic algorithms in search, optimization, and machine learning. Addison-Wesley Professional, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  • Hák T, Moldan B, Dahl AL (eds.) (2007) Sustainability indicators—a scientific assessment. Island Press, USA

  • Halsnaes K, Shukla P (2008). Sustainable development as a framework for developing country participation. In: International climate change policies, mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change, Springer, Berlin, vol 13(2), pp 105–130

  • Hooke R, Jeeves TA (1961) Direct search solution of numerical and statistical problems. J Assoc Comput Mach 8(2):212–229

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hsu A et al (2016) 2016 environmental performance index. Yale University, New Haven. http://epi.yale.edu/sites/ default/files/2016EPI_Full_Report.pdf

  • Huang PS, Shih LH (2009) Effective environmental management through environmental knowledge management. Int J Environ Sci Technol 6(1):35–50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Human Development Report Office (2015) Sustaining human progress: reducing vulnerabilities and building resilience. http://hdr.undp.org/en/2015-report

  • Jesinghaus J (2007) Why we need the MDG dashboard of sustainability? In: Beyond GDP virtual indicator expo international conference, Brussels, Belgium, November 19th–20th, 2007. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ beyond_gdp/download/bgdp-ve-mdg-dashboard.pdf

  • Jha R, Murthy KVB (2008) A critique of the environmental sustainability index. Departmental Working Papers 2003–08, Australian National University, Economics RSPAS

  • Jolliffe IT (2002). Principal component analysis. Springer Series in Statistics (2nd ed.), Springer, New York

  • Kaly UL, Pratt CR, Mitchell J (2004) The environmental vulnerability index (EVI) 2004. SOPAC Technical Report 384. http://www.sopac.org/sopac/evi/Files/EVI2004TechnicaReport.pdf

  • Kashem SB, Irawan A, Wilson B (2014) Evaluating the dynamic impacts of urban form on transportation and environmental outcomes in US cities. Int J Environ Sci Technol 11(8):2233–2244

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Kirkpatrick S, Gelatt CD, Vecchi MP (1983) Optimization by simulated annealing. Science 220(4598):671–680

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Kohonen T (1982) Self-organized formation of topologically correct feature maps. Biol Cybern 43(1):59–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd SP (1982) Least squares quantization in PCM. IEEE Trans Inf Theory 28(2):129–137

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacQueen JB (1967) Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations. In: Proceedings of the fifth berkeley symposium on mathematical statistics and probability, University of California Press, vol 1, pp 281–197

  • MATLAB Release (2009) MatLab and Simulink. The MathWorks, Inc., Natick

  • McRae L, Freeman R, Deinet S (2014) The living planet index. In: McLellan R, Iyengar L, Jeffries B, Oerlemans N (eds) Living planet report 2014: species and spaces, people and places. WWF, Gland, Switzerland, 2014. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/

  • Moldan B, Hák T, Kovanda J, Havranek M, Kuskova P (2004) Composite indicators of environmental sustainability, statistics, knowledge and policy. OECD World Forum on Key Indicators, Palermo, 10–13 November 2004

  • Mori KA, Christodoulou A (2011) Review of sustainability indices and indicators: towards a new city sustainability index (CSI). Environ Impact Assess Rev 32(1):94–106

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morse S (2016) Measuring the success of sustainable development indices in terms of reporting by the global press. Soc Indic Res 125(2):359–375

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Parmar KS, Bhardwaj R (2013) Water quality index and fractal dimension analysis of water parameters. Int J Environ Sci Technol 10(1):151–164

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Pillarisetti IR, van den Bergh JCJM (2010) Sustainable nations: What do aggregate indexes tell us? Environ Dev Sustain 12(1):49–62

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramadass K, Smith E, Palanisami T, Mathieson G, Srivastava P, Megharaj M, Naidu R (2015) Evaluation of constraints in bioremediation of weathered hydrocarbon-contaminated arid soils through microcosm biopile study. Int J Environ Sci Technol 12(11):3597–3612

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Rassafi AA, Vaziri M (2005) Sustainable transport indicators: definition and integration. Int J Environ Sci Technol 2(1):83–96

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rees WE (1992) Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: what urban economics leaves out. Environ Urban 4(2):121–130

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rousseeuw PJ (1987) Silhouettes: a graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis. Comput Appl Math 20(1):53–65

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saljak J, Krajnc D, Glavic P (2004) Measuring sustainability—index of balanced sustainable development. In: Sikdar SK, Glavic P, Jain R (eds) Technological choices for sustainability. Springer, Berlin, pp 335–354. ISBN 978-3-642-05934-6

  • Sands GR, Podmore TH (2000) A generalized environmental sustainability index for agricultural systems. Agri Ecosyst Environ 79(1):29–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott Cato M (2009) Green economics. Earthscan, London, pp 36–37

    Google Scholar 

  • Siche JR, Agostinho F, Ortega E, Romeiro A (2008) Sustainability of nations by indices: comparative study between environmental sustainability index, ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices. Ecol Econ 66(4):628–637

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sironen S, Seppälä J, Leskinen P (2015) Towards more non-compensatory sustainable society index. Environ Dev Sustain 17(3):587–621

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Specht DF (1990) Probabilistic neural networks and the polynomial adaline as complementary techniques to classification. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 1(1):111–121

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Specht DF (1991) A general regression neural network. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 2(6):568–576

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Sutton PC (2003) An empirical environmental sustainability index derived solely from nighttime satellite imagery and ecosystem service valuation. Popul Environ 24(4):293–311

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tambouratzis T (2014) An investigation of the environmental sustainability index in terms of its prediction and clustering capabilities. In: Proceedings of the “2014 international joint conference on neural networks”, part of the “2104 IEEE world congress on computational intelligence”, Beijing, China, July 6th–11th, 2014, #N-14909

  • Tambouratzis T (2015) Investigating the reliability of the environmental sustainability index 2005. In: Proceedings of the “2015 IEEE international joint conference on neural networks” (IEEE IJCNN’15), Killarney, Ireland, UK, July 12th–17th, 2015, 978-1-4799-1959-8/15/$31.00©, 2015

  • Tambouratzis T (2016) A step-wise genetic-algorithm-based approach for improving the sustainability of any country and for determining the characteristics of the ideally sustainable country. In: Proceedings of the “2016 IEEE world congress on computational intelligence (IEEE WCCI’16)”, Vancouver, Canada, July 25th–29th, 2016

  • Thorndike RL (1953) Who belongs in the family? Psychometrika 18(4):267–276

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van de Kerk G (2014) Sustainable society index, tool for measuring well-being. In: Michalos AC (ed) Encyclopaedia of quality of life and well-being research, pp 6516–6525

  • Wackernagel M (1994) Ecological footprint and appropriated carrying capacity: a tool for planning toward sustainability. Ph.D. thesis, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

  • Walsh PR (2011) Creating a “values” chain for sustainable development in developing nations: where Maslow meets Porter. Environ Dev Sustain 13(4):789–805

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ward JH Jr (1963) Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. J Am Stat Assoc 58(301):236–244

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yigitcanlar T, Kamruzzaman M (2014) Investigating the interplay between transport, land use and the environment: a review of the literature. Int J Environ Sci Technol 11(8):2121–2132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yigitcanlar T, Teriman S (2015) Rethinking sustainable urban development: towards an integrated planning and development process. Int J Environ Sci Technol 12(1):341–352

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou P, Ang BW, Poh KL (2006) Comparing aggregating methods for constructing the composite environmental index: an objective measure. Ecol Econ 59:305–311

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank (a) her colleagues at the Sustainable Nuclear Energy Centre (SNEC), Chalmers University of Technology, for the fika meetings during the author’s visit in September–December 2013, which—in a roundabout way—led to the idea behind this piece of research; (b) her fellow researchers and scientists for their insightful questions during the conference presentations which led to the further development of this piece of research, and (c) the anonymous reviewers for their constructive as well as instructive comments that aided significantly in the fine-tuning of this publication.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Management and Technology, University of Piraeus, 80 Karaoli & Demetriou St, 185 34, Piraeus, Greece

    T. Tambouratzis

Authors
  1. T. Tambouratzis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to T. Tambouratzis.

Additional information

Editorial responsibility: M. Abbaspour.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Tambouratzis, T. Analysing the construction of the environmental sustainability index 2005. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 13, 2817–2836 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-016-1108-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-016-1108-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation