DEA Environmental Assessment (II): A Literature Study

This chapter systematically summarizes previous research efforts, including concepts and methodologies, on DEA environmental assessment applied to energy in the past three decades. Industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities. The problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air, water and others types of contaminations, all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes. Thus, it is necessary for us to think how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation in order to maintain a high level of social and corporate sustainability in the world. It is widely considered among researchers and practitioners that DEA is one of methodologies to examine the level of sustainability. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the importance of DEA in assessing unified (operational and environmental) performance of various entities in public and private sectors by summarizing previous research efforts on environmental assessment. The literature survey in this chapter covers 407 articles on DEA applications in energy and environment. It is true that DEA is not a perfect methodology, rather being an approximation methodology for performance assessment. The methodology has strengths and drawbacks in applications. Therefore, it is very important for us to carefully use DEA for guiding large policy and business strategies regarding the global warming and climate change. An underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering may solve the pollution and climate problem by linking it with economic and business concerns. The DEA provides such a linkage between engineering and social science, so enhancing the practicality in mitigating environmental pollutions. It is envisioned that the literature study, along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments discussed in Chap. 16 , provides researchers and individuals who are interested in social and corporate sustainability with analytical and methodological guidelines for their future research works on DEA environmental assessment.