Sustainable development in Cuba assessed with sustainability window and doughnut economy approaches

ABSTRACT

Sustainability Window (SuWi) analysis is a novel tool to analyze the minimum economic development to fulfill the requirements for social sustainability and the maximum economic development not to surpass the environmental limits. The method provides quantitative measures to define whether the real development of GDP is within the sustainability limits using different indicators for measuring social welfare and environmental stress. The SuWi results can be used to form a visualization of the sustainability doughnut to illustrate the critical areas of development where policy intervention may be needed to reach sustainability. The doughnut economy visualization is constructed for Cuban development for the analysis of both strong and weak sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• indicators
• Sustainability Window (SuWi)
• doughnut economy
• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Cuba

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the Academy of Finland for funding the project “Cuban energy transformation Integration of renewable intermittent sources in the power system (IRIS)”, decision n:o 320229.

Annex

Social inclusion is calculated based on the completion rates of the upper secondary school of different groups. The used data (UNESCO 2020) is for (1) Urban and Rural areas, for (2) Oriente and Occidente (Eastern and Western part of the country), and for (3) Female and Male students. The data is for the years 2006, 2010, and 2016. The difference in the completion rates for the above-mentioned groups has been divided by the average completion rate. The sum for the three groups has been divided by three. This figure is then subtracted from one to provide the social inclusion indicator. The indicator has a maximum value of 1 when all the variables are equal.

Social inclusion indicator = 1 – ((U-R)/Av + (Or – Oc)/Av + (F-M)/Av)/3

where

U is the completion rate value for Urban students,

R is the completion rate value for Rural students,

Or is the completion rate value for Oriente students,

Oc is the completion rate value for Occidente students,

F is the completion rate value for Female students,

M is the completion rate value for Male students,

Av is the completion rate Average value of all the groups.

Author statement

Anaely Saunders: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Resources; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing.

Jyrki Luukkanen: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [320229].