Playing It SAFE
Fuzzy logic helps rank most sustainable nations
Which nation is more sustainable: Albania or Angola? Before you place your bet, you might want to consult a new mathematical model that tries to improve efforts to grade countries on how they manage their resources for the long-term.
Although even experts don’t agree on exactly what “sustainability” means, there have been numerous efforts to put the buzzword on a stronger numerical footing. Over the last few decades, for instance, researchers have come up with more than a dozen models for combining all kinds of information – from the number of endangered species living in a particular country, to the amount it spends on health care – into a single sustainability score. In Ecological Economics, three researchers from the Technical University of Crete in Greece take a crack at polishing one of these models, called Sustainability Assessment by Fuzzy Evaluation, or SAFE.
SAFE uses 75 kinds of information, including national statistics on fertilizer consumption, desertification, poverty and educational achievement, to generate “ecological” and “societal” sustainability scores. One of SAFE’s advantages, the authors say, is that it can use an approach called “fuzzy logic” to incorporate qualitative or approximated information – such as a statements like “the pesticide consumption of country A is about 6 kg per hectare” or “country B has a very high level of corruption.” It can also be updated to reflect changing circumstances; for instance, by making a country’s greenhouse gas emissions a more important factor than it might have been 20 years ago. And, using some clever statistical techniques, it can even “guesstimate” missing information.
In their study, the researchers updated SAFE to use data from 1990 to 2005 in assessing the sustainability of 128 nations. Once the number crunching was done, European nations topped the rankings. Switzerland was first, followed by Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, France, Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The United States ranked 29th, just below Ireland and above Slovenia. At the bottom of the heap was Sudan. The bottom ten also included India, Ethiopia, and Pakistan.
Some nations – including Greece – had their overall ranking pulled down by weak economic or social well-being scores. The U.S., Germany and Spain, in contrast, lost ground because of poor ecological rankings, sometimes driven by factors like high greenhouse gas emissions. Still other nations, such as Ecuador and India, ranked poorly because they “are developing countries and their problems are both ecological and human,” the authors noted. Most importantly, they say, the ranking “pinpoints those basic indicators that affect the sustainability the most,” giving policymakers an idea of where they can make improvements.
Oh, and Albania? It ranked 40th, while Angola came in 92nd. – David Malakoff | November 18, 2010
Source: Phillis, Y., Grigoroudis, E., & Kouikoglou, V. (2010). Sustainability ranking and improvement of countries. Ecological Economics DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.09.037
Image © Joachim Wendler | Dreamstime.com
