A mega-index for the Americas and its underlying sustainable development correlations

Abstract

Indicators and their composite indices have been embraced as development tools for guiding humanity toward a sustainable destination. In response, public and private organizations have generated hundreds of these metrics, making their application overwhelming to policymakers, planners, and scientists. Past reviews have revealed that a majority of common development indices have theoretical or quantitative shortcomings, supporting that there is no consensus regarding their theoretical basis, design, use, thresholds-of-effect, or validation. In response, this study was designed around four guiding research questions: (i) What are the underlying development themes within a collection of established sustainability indices, and what distinguishes winning locations from losing ones? (ii) Are the three major divisions of sustainability (economic growth, social equity, environmental integrity) equally represented by current sustainable development measuring initiatives? (iii) Could just a few common and freely available indicators capture all present dimensions of sustainable development? (iv) Would a new sustainable development mega-index research paradigm improve humanity's ability to assess progress toward sustainability? Those questions were investigated using data from 30 mostly contiguous Western Hemisphere nations and three amassing methodological objectives. First, 31 known indices were reduced into underlying dimensions (factors) of sustainable development. Next, those factors were combined (aggregated) into the first mega-index of sustainable development (MISD). Finally, 11 common development indicators were explored regarding collinearity and explanatory power of the sustainable development dimensions and MISD. Seven latent dimensions (sub-metrics) captured over 85% of the variation of the original 31 indices, with socioeconomic themes dwarfing environmental ones. The factors conveyed: (F1) socioeconomic well-being synergies; (F2) economic freedom and democracy; (F3) environmentally efficient happiness; (F4) ecosystem wellbeing; (F5) peace to economic vulnerability tradeoff; (F6) natural resources protection; and (F7) environmental stewardship and risk resilience. MISD is the geometric mean of the seven sub-metrics, which were directed toward sustainability, and rescaled (normalized) 0 (worst case) to 100 (best case). Geographically, this study ranked Belize best overall, followed by Guyana, Panama, Uruguay, and Canada; Barbados ranked worst, preceded by Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Cuba. Winning countries were characterized by low population density, increased forestland, decreased urban, and larger country area. Child mortality and population growth rate remained negative predictors of socioeconomic conditions; however per-capita CO2 sacrificed ecological integrity for improved human well-being. Mega-index creation will serve as an important scientific stepping-stone for improving accuracy and simplifying valuations of sustainable development, thus others should follow.

Irrigation Salinity Risk Assessment and Mapping in Arid Oasis, Northwest China

“…Although these studies have identified the main anthropogenic and natural causes of salinity and the mechanisms behind them [29]. However, sustainable development is the holistic approach, including the three major divisions of economy, social and environment, so there is a huge requirement to excavate the indicators [30][31][32][33]. Therefore, scientific effort should not only be put into scientific indicator sources but should also be directed towards traditional information sources, since traditional knowledge may be holistic in outlook and adaptive by nature.…”

“…In the subjective weight assignment, the weights of relative importance of the parameters may be assigned based on the expert's preferences for the considered application, it has poor sense of interdependent criteria [36][37][38]. In the objective weight assignment, the weights of parameter's relative importance can be calculated by means of conventional statistical measures, it has poor sense of expert's preferences [33,34]. Therefore, it is rational to suppose that the combined use of subjective and objective weight assignment in soil salinity risk assessment is an interesting attempt.…”

“…In the objective weight assignment, the weights of relative importance of the parameters were calculated based on the curtain statistical method [33,48], that gives invaluable information about the data distribution. In this study, the maximizing deviation method (MDM) is selected to calculate the weights for parameters, because of the best reliability than method of standard deviation between classes, criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation and entropy method.…”

Methodology of Complex Evaluation of Sustainable Development of Socio-Environmental-Economic Systems

“…The links between environmental conditions and living standards of the population of the region are shown in paper [9], and at the state level a similar topic is studied in paper [10]. Aspects of the most global importance are considered in the scientific works devoted to the methodology of measuring SEЕS sustainable development within the complex-valued development of the territory [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Sustainable Development of the Economic Circle around Beijing: A View of Regional Economic Disparity

“…According to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it clearly presents the relatively low level of correlation between the results obtained by individual European Union Member States on the subsequent levels of monitoring the implementation of EU strategy [10]. In the Americas, Shaker measured the three major divisions of sustainability (economic growth, social equity, environmental integrity), and ranked Belize best overall, followed by Guyana, Panama, Uruguay, and Canada; Barbados ranked worst, preceded by Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Cuba [11]. The BRICS ( Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of countries is widely held to offer the prospect of a new approach to sustainable development, renewable energy and green economic growth in Africa, China and India have a significant existing and growing capacity to help move this forward [12].…”