Key Indicators of Sustainable Development
A total of 75 mandatory indicators are used in 128 countries. The definitions of these indicators are provided, Organization for Supply and Agriculture (FAO), United Nations for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Details (OECD, website), United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), United Nations Department of Statistics (2006), United Nations Detailed Program (UNDP), United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Increase (UNFCCC), and World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, many of these references provide annual data close to the indicators that are of little importance for most countries around the world.
Measuring Sustainability
There is no universal definition of sustainability. Values and political and economic interests play an internal role in the sustainability debate. However, from a scientific point of view, an irrefutable approach provides a tool for comparison between countries that have documented their path towards sustainable development.
An overview of this approach is provided in the following.
Pressure state response (PSR)
This model was completed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and is based on the fact that humans put pressure on the ecosystems and societies in which they maintain their status and are undeniable for their undeniable responses. Socio-economic indicators are attracting more attention, but the main focus is on the ecological side.
Ecological footprint
Introduced by Rees, it calculates the equivalent land required to produce essential non-removable resources and churn the non-removable waste associated with a given population. Simply put, an ecological footprint is a productive land used by the population. It is unreasonable in terms of ecology, and it calculates land area, not sustainability score.
Indicator of sustainability
This model was introduced by IUCN and is a visual tool for sustainability assessment. There are two basic components of a country's sustainability: ecosystem well-being and human well-being. All metrics are scaled by [0,100], where 0 is the worst performance and 100 is the more weighted performance of the metric. Then, the score is calculated as a simple count.
Environmental sustainability tabulate (ESI)
ESI calculates a country's environmental sustainability table based on 21 indicators, which in turn are evaluated on 76 datasets. The ESI table is calculated as a weighted stereotype of metrics with the same weight. The country ranking is determined accordingly.
Driving sustainability by fuzzy assessment (SAFE)
This model was introduced by Phillis and Andriantiatsaholiniaina (2001), Andriantiatsaholiniaina et al. (2004), Kouloumpis et al. (2008), and Phillis and Kouikoglou (2009). SAFE is a hierarchical fuzzy inference system. Using "IF-THEN" rules and knowledge encoded with fuzzy logic, we combine 75 input, tab-delimited critical indicators into increasingly complex variables that describe different environmental and social aspects, and finally [0,1].
Multiple criteria and fuzzy logic
An ESI-like model using 74 indicators and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), along with a fuzzy inference scheme similar to SAFE, was introduced by Liu. While MCDM has three stages: decomposition, weighting, and synthesis, it computes a volume sustainability table through sequential fuzzy inference.
Sustainable society table (SSI)
SSI is based on 22 environmental and social indicators aggregated into five main categories using equal weights. Then, the five categories are aggregated into SSI using unequal weights. It is ranked accordingly in all 150 countries.
