Calculating composite indicators for sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability indicators are gaining more and more attention as a powerful tool for supporting policy making, providing information on different fields, such as environment, economy, society, technology etc. A very important aspect when dealing with sustainability indicators is related to the procedure for the construction of composite indices, that combine the information coming from several indicators and that are easier to be managed and communicated. The paper investigates the use of indicators in sustainability assessment of projects, plans and programmes and proposes an application of the Multi Attribute Value Theory (MAVT) for the definition of synthetic indices of evaluation. With the aim of highlighting potentialities and limits of the proposed approach, the methodology is applied to a real case concerning a set of wellbeing indicators. The results of the study show that MAVT is suitable for dealing with the aggregation of indicators systems.