General Description

This chapter describes the structure of this book. Our description focuses upon the analytical structure and practicality of Data Envelopment Analysis-Environment Assessment (DEA-EA) which may be useful for sustainability enhancement. The method, originated from the unique features of DEA, has extended it by incorporating undesirable (bad) outputs, such as CO2 emission, into its analytical feature. The DEA does not require any specification of a functional form, rather measuring weights (multipliers) among inputs and outputs (desirable and undesirable). Thus, the method is non-parametric and distribution-free estimation. In this book, we discuss the strengths and drawbacks of DEA-EA from the perspective of several sustainability developments. Our discussion in this book will focus upon energy and its consumption, along with environmental issues, because many energy issues are closely related to various environmental difficulties. Acknowledging the importance of combatting various energy and environmental issues, we pay attention to the importance of not only pollution reduction but all economic prosperity for sustainability enhancement. Many individuals, including policy makers, business leaders and researchers, believe that we must solve various environmental issues even with or without capital accumulation. It may be true that an effective resource allocation from capital accumulation is indeed important for future eco-technology developments as found in the concept of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). Our underlying philosophy discussed in this book is that we need to develop green innovation and managerial challenges to support technology progress and economic policy to reduce an amount of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission so that we can reduce a temperature change and other climate changes in the world. However, we know that our research scope is, however, limited within the boundary of quantitative methods such as DEA, DEA-EA and other statistical approaches. Toward such a research direction, this book methodologically discusses three concerns. First, we propose the use of DEA-EA, as an approach, to assess various aspects concerning ESG developments along with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Second, we consider the formulations of DEA-EA in a time horizon because many environment difficulties occur over time. Finally, we are not interested in a standard use of DEA for conventional performance assessment, rather discussing a new use for sustainability developments which are closely related to ESG and SDGs.