The Sustainable Energy Development Index—An Application for European Union Member States

Abstract

The development of a complete system of indicators and a composite sustainable energy index could prove useful to evaluate both the state of the art and the progress of national energy towards sustainable development. However, in the case of energy sustainability, a knowledge gap arises due to incomplete coverage and lack of systematic focus on sustainability components. The objective of our research is to obtain Sustainable Energy Development Aggregated Index to rank the EU Member States on the path to sustainable energy. We propose a set of indicators related to sustainable development in energy policy in the EU-28, grouped in three dimensions: social, economic and environmental and apply the standardized sums method in order to obtain the dimensional and aggregated indexes. The countries on the podium are Denmark, The Netherlands and Austria. The worst-performing countries (with index values below the first quartile) are Estonia, Malta, Slovakia, Poland, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria. A comparative analysis of the outcome with a few existing indexes for the EU Member States shows how large an impact on the index values and the ranking obtained does the selection of indicators and the methodology used have. The refinement of the set of energy indicators is necessary for the context where they will be applied to ensure their policy relevance and usefulness. It is also necessary to conduct a sensitivity analysis each time in the study.

Assessing the Level of Energy and Climate Sustainability in the European Union Countries in the Context of the European Green Deal Strategy and Agenda 2030

“…The economic and social indicators were found to be really low in these countries, which results in the high exposure of their inhabitants to energy exclusion caused by the low quality of energy supplied, its availability, and high price [82,83]. These results show some differences versus the results presented in another work [15], in which the leaders in energy sustainability for 2017 included Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, and Sweden, respectively, with Cyprus and Bulgaria ranking last. Luxembourg's high position in this study was due to its wealth rather than energy or climate factors.…”

“…The close link between energy and climate protection, as the basis of sustainable economic development, enforces certain activities to assess the effects of the introduced changes. It seems most reasonable to use sustainable development indicators, including energy and climate, to monitor this state, e.g., [4,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. The analysis of changes in the values of these indicators makes it possible to assess the effects of actions undertaken to achieve sustainable development by individual countries.…”

Analysis of Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Peru and Its Departments during the Year 2006 - 2018

“…Where: "DV": is the composite indicator [dependent variable], " f[M 1,2,3,4,5, ] ": functions of the regression models and "IV": dimensions of the independent variables. (16) Where i: for a given department [average/total], t: at a given time [year]; weighting factor Wec [1,2] : for economic sustainability 0.10, Wso [1,2,3,4] : for social sustainability 0.10, Wen [1,2,3,4,5] : for environmental sustainability 0.08, W[p] [1] : for precipitation 0.3, W[tx] [2] for maximum temperature 0.4 and W[tm] [3] for minimum temperature 0.3.…”

“…Sustainable development is a carefully planned strategy to embrace growth while using resources more efficiently [1], [2], with maximum consideration of the immediate and long term benefits for our planet and human beings living in it [2], [3]. Sustainable development encourages us to conserve and improve our resource base [4], [5], gradually changing the ways in which it is developed and technologies of use [6], [7].…”

“…In order to measure all these positive and negative effects of Peru and its departments, we used the sustainable development index and the climate sustainability index [2], [45][46]. One of the key questions of the sustainable and climate index is how organizations in developing countries are achieving their urban and rural development [1], [2], [42]; therefore, the following research leads us to evaluate the sustainable and climate index of Peru during the years 2006 to 2018 as well as to design regression models between both research topics.…”