Evaluating strategies for sustainable development: fuzzy logic reasoning and sensitivity analysis

Sustainable decision-making involves political decisions at the local, regional, or national levels, which aim at a balanced development of socio-environmental systems. A fundamental question in sustainable decision-making is that of defining and measuring sustainable development. Many methods have been proposed to assess sustainability. Recently, a model has been developed, called Sustainability Assessment by Fuzzy Evaluation (SAFE), which uses fuzzy logic reasoning and basic indicators of environmental integrity, economic efficiency, and social welfare, and derives measures of human (HUMS), ecological (ECOS), and overall sustainability (OSUS). In this article, we perform sensitivity analysis of the SAFE model to identify the most important factors contributing to sustainable development. About 80 different indicators are tested and classified as promoting, impeding, or having no effect on the progress toward sustainable development. The proposed method is applied to the Greek and American economics. The conclusion is that there is no unique sustainable path and, accordingly, policy makers should choose different criteria and strategies to make efficient sustainable decisions for each country. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.