Streamlining Sustainability: A Principal Component Reduction for Regionally Based African-Centric Indicators

Ecological indicators were created to measure human consumption of Earth’s finite resources. Since 1992, hundreds of indicators have been created at the global scale. These indicators reveal that, while there might be similarities between regions of the world, each region has its own distinctive characteristics. This article concentrates on the forty odd created for the regions of Africa. The statistical outliers from twenty plus ecological indicators were subjected to a Principal Component Analysis to reduce and create composite indicators that would better reflect the regional variability. The data reduction – or streamlining – resulted in the creation of three indicators per region (fifteen in all) that accounted for, on average, 77.6 percent of the variance in the ecological data. Out of the fifteen variables extracted, four from the original stock of indicators made it through the reduction process indicating that those particular indicators measured exactly what they were supposed to measure.