Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Quantifying Sustainability:
Methodology for and Determinants of
an Environmental Sustainability Index
Kobi Abayomi
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Victor de la Pena
Columbia University, USA
Upmanu Lall
Columbia University, USA
Marc Levy
CIESIN at Columbia University, USA
ABSTRACT
This chapter consider new methods of component extraction and identification for the Environmental
Sustainability Index (ESI) - an aggregation of environmental variables created as a measure of overall
progress towards environmental sustainability. Principally, the authors propose and illustrate a para-
metric version of Independent Component Analysis via Copulas (CICA). The CICA procedure yields a
more coherent picture of the determinants of environmental sustainability.
INTRODUCTION
perspective, the goal is to identify (possibly lower
dimension) versions of multivariate data via the
extraction of salient characteristics. The data may
then be recast, modulo
these characteristics, as input to further model-
ing. From a theoretical perspective, the proposition
of a method for dimension reduction depends upon
the declaration of characteristics that can offer a
sound basis for extraction.
Shrinkage methods - statistical dimension re-
ductions - are important and popular alterna-
tives to numerical models in fields as diverse as
climatology, psychology and econometrics. The
objective in these methods is to identify a subset
of coordinates that sufficiently describe the evolu-
tion of specific state variables. From an applied
