The Efficient and Viable Country-Oriented Attainment of Absolute Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

A country-oriented methodology for attaining absolute environmental sustainability (ES) is proposed and demonstrated on the environmental sustainability index (ESI) 2002. The optimal means of deriving the ES levels/scores of the participating countries from the various ESI 2002 constructs is established and, subsequently, encoded in a real-valued evolution strategy (EvS) for the viable and flexible country-specific ES improvement towards maximal ES. The EvS employs: (a) constraints concerning the number and combinations of constructs that can be concurrently improved; (b) limited and progressively decreasing construct improvements expressing the escalating difficulty of improving any construct as the construct and/or overall ES approach(es) maximum. Demonstrations on countries with diverse characteristics and comparisons with alternative optimization methodologies highlight the versatility and applicability of the proposed procedure to any country with data that is compatible to that of the participating countries.