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Energy, Environment and Transitional Green Growth in China pp 15–36Cite as

Composite Indicators for Sustainability Assessment: Methodological Developments

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Abstract

Problems such as climate change, environmental pollution and depletion of natural resources pave the way of sustainable development. Past two decades have seen the development of numerous indicators for sustainable development to support policy analysis and decision making. Recently, composite indicators have evolved as a popular analytical tool for sustainability assessment. The construction of composite sustainability indicators involves not only the determination of underlying indicators but also their weighting and aggregation. This chapter provides a systematic and up-to-date review of recent methodological developments in constructing composite sustainability indicators, which range from normalization methods to aggregation models. The pros and cons of each method/model have been discussed. Other fundamental aspects, e.g. the principles of selecting aggregation function and robustness analysis, are also discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 71273005 & 71573119) and the Funding of Jiangsu Innovation Program for Graduate Education (KYZZ16_0159).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 29 Jiangjun Avenue, Nanjing, China

    P. Zhou & L. P. Zhang

  2. School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum, No. 66 Changjiang West Road, Qingdao, China

    P. Zhou

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Economic and Social Development, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Ruizhi Pang

  2. College of Economic and Social Development, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Xuejie Bai

  3. School of Economics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Knox Lovell

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Zhou, P., Zhang, L.P. (2018). Composite Indicators for Sustainability Assessment: Methodological Developments. In: Pang, R., Bai, X., Lovell, K. (eds) Energy, Environment and Transitional Green Growth in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7919-1_2

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