An application of reference point techniques to the calculation of synthetic sustainability indicators

Abstract

Sustainability is nowadays a key factor to analyse the development of the societies. Therefore, measuring sustainability is a main concern of the scientific community. The basic necessity to simultaneously consider the economical, social and environmental aspects make sustainability, by nature, a multicriteria concept, and therefore, multicriteria techniques are to be used to measure it. In this paper, we propose a method to develop synthetic sustainability indicators, based on the double (reservation–aspiration) reference point approach. This scheme is applied to each territorial unit considered, in order to determine, on the base of a given set of indicators, a couple of synthetic indicators that measure the weak and the strong sustainability of the unit.

Keywords:

• multicriteria analysis
• reference point techniques
• synthetic indicators
• sustainability
• reservation–aspiration

Acknowledgements

This research was partly supported by the Andalusian Regional Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprises (PAI group SEJ-445) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Research Project MTM2006-01921).