Environmental Assessment on Energy and Sustainability by Data Envelopment Analysis

1GENERAL DESCRIPTION

1.1 INTRODUCTION

It is important to keep in mind that the purpose and interest of this book are not a conventional use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for efficiency measurement and performance analysis. Rather, this book will direct our research attention and concerns toward a new use of DEA on environment assessment and sustainability development. This chapter¹ is designed to discuss a new research direction for DEA.

This book consists of two sections (I and II). As an initial step, this chapter starts by reviewing fundamental research concepts for a conventional use of DEA. Such a conventional use will be discussed in all chapters of Section I. Then, Section II will extend it from the perspective of policy and business implications concerning environmental assessment and sustainability development. The methodology used for the newly proposed research is referred to as “DEA environmental assessment.” In addition to the environmental assessment, this book focuses upon energy sectors in the world because they are closely associated with various types of industrial pollution. An important environmental issue to be discussed in this book is how to challenge global warming and climate change in the world. Of course, we clearly understand that it is not easy to solve these climate issues by using only the proposed DEA environmental assessment and its applications to energy sectors. Rather, this book will attempt to investigate the global difficulty from the perspectives ...