A comparison of environmental and energetic performance of European countries: A sustainability index

By Federica Cucchiella, Idiano D'Adamo, Massimo Gastaldi, S. L. Lenny Koh, Paolo Rosa. 2017

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, European countries agreed on a new 2030-pact establishing challenging levels for a set of climate and energy indexes in order to achieve a more competitive, safe and sustainable energy system. In order to evaluate current sustainability performances of European countries from the environmental and energetic perspectives, this research proposes a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) that, starting from both Eurostat data and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), allows a direct comparison of nations. To this aim, multiple indexes are taken into account (e.g. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Government expenditures for environmental protection, Recycled and reused waste from electric and electronic equipments (WEEEs), Recycled and reused waste from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), Recycled materials from Municipal Solid Wastes (MSWs), Share of renewable energy (RE) in electricity, Share of RE in transport, Share of RE in heating and cooling and Primary energy consumption). This assessment model provides a sustainability value for each European country and the related ranking with the European average. Results show as, even nowadays, twelve out of twenty-eight European countries have a value greater than the European average in 2013. Top four nations (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Austria) have high indexes of sustainability and Sweden is the best country from both the environmental and energetic perspectives.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cee64a3a94b80a5729e3e8b3596725384eac95ea

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas
2. João C. O. Matias
3. Dalia Streimikiene
4. Radu Godina
5. Joseph Sarkis
6. Susana Garrido Azevedo
7. Zenonas Turskis

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. João C. O. Matias
2. Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas
3. Radu Godina
4. Joseph Sarkis
5. Susana Garrido Azevedo

Citations in the corpus

• A supply chain sustainability innovation framework and evaluation methodology (2018, methodology): “, 2017b); AHP (Cucchiella et al., 2017) are some recent efforts of utilizing MCDM techniques for sustainable supply chain evaluation.”
• Proposal of a Sustainable Circular Index for Manufacturing Companies (2017, methodology): “Other methods of aggregation have been used to construct a composite index such as the Geometric Mean [155].”
• An Overview of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods in Dealing with Sustainable Energy Development Issues (2018, background): “[20] to develop a sustainability index, the aim of which is to assess sustainability of the European countries from the environmental and energy perspective.”
• Identifying the Equilibrium Point between Sustainability Goals and Circular Economy Practices in an Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Context Using Eco-Design (2019, background): “…Programme for the Environment 2013–2020 sets as its second priority the objective to turn the Union into a low-carbon (Sugiawan et al. 2019), resource-efficient, ecological, and competitive economy, (Breure et al. 2018) capable of mitigating climate change (Cucchiella et al. 2017; D’Adamo 2018).”