Indicators for Assessing Sustainability Performance

Abstract

Sustainability is a universally advocated and quoted concept. To assess the sustainability performance of an entity, e.g,. a company, an industry or a country, appropriate indicators are often developed for the use of analysts and decision makers. Numerous sustainability indicators can be found in the literature, which vary from a non-composite indicators to composite indicators. We first deal with noncomposite indicators for sustainability. We then introduce the concept of composite indicators and discuss why they are more suitable for assessing sustainability. From the viewpoint of operations research, we describe the methods for constructing composite sustainability indicators and highlight the usefulness of multiple criteria decision analysis and data envelopment analysis. An illustrative example is presented for assessing alternative methods in constructing composite sustainability indicators.