Katryna Vergis-Mayo
Evaluating Sustainable Development across the Americas: Application of Indicators of Sustainable Development ©2016
The topic of sustainability and sustainable development has become increasingly popular over the last few decades. Sustainable development refers to humans’ actions on the environment and its impacts, development, socioeconomics and the legislation that is used to manage the issues and usages to try to deter from negative impacts on the environment created by humankind. The United Nations created a panel to determine and examine this complex issue and to create sustainable indicators to evaluate sustainability within an area while providing information and guidance for these indicators. However, to increase the use of sustainable indicators, a study was conducted at the global scale for countries within North and South America. It incorporates social, economic, and environmental sustainable indicators to measure the sustainability of each country in the Americas. The study incorporates global spatial autocorrelation, a Pearson Product-Moment correlation, a k-Means cluster analysis, and a ranking system of the sustainable indicators to assess sustainable development at a global scale. The study found that several of the variables experienced spatial autocorrelation. The correlations between variables were examined such as the Ecosystem Stress Index and the Ecosystem Wellbeing Index, which experienced a perfect negative correlation. Further, the Gross Domestic Product Index experienced the highest multi-collinearity across the variables. Additionally, clusters of countries that had similar sustainable development ranks and indicator values were created to help guide sustainability policies and initiative in the respective country. It was found that many developing countries experienced very good and good sustainable development levels, whereas many developed countries were ranked as fair for sustainable development. Further, an anomaly was found in the research as Costa Rica, a country that had one of the highest sustainable development ranks was grouped in the worst sustainable development cluster.