A Research on the Relationship between Environmental Sustainability Management and Human Development

Abstract

The study explores the relationship between environmental performance and human development. A canonical correlation analysis was conducted to discover the maximum correlation between environmental performance and human development with the optimal estimated weights for indicators as constituting the composite indices. The results show that environmental health—being the most decisive—and ecosystem vitality are important indicators for representing the environmental performance. Other important indicators, in declining order, for constituting the human development index are mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling, and life expectancy at birth, with gross national income (GNI) being the last with relatively low weight. The canonical environmental performance index has utmost effect on mean years of schooling, then expected years of schooling, with explanatory power of more than 70% for both. Effect on life expectancy at birth is more than 60%, but only less than 30% on GNI. The canonical human development index has the highest explanatory power with nearly 80% for environmental health, but only 40% for ecosystem vitality. Both canonical composite indices reach a high correlation of 91% and the mutual explanatory power is 83%, confirming that environmental performance and human development are indeed positively and highly correlated.

Drivers of the European Union’s Environmental Performance

“…An increase with 1% of tertiary school in total school attendance is increasing the value of EPI with 0.03 units. The results are in line with those of Lai and Chen (2020) and Gallego-Alvarez et al (2014). Also, these can be correlated with the European University Association report (Stöber et al, 2021), where 392 higher education institutions from the European Higher Education Area reveal, though a survey, their greening activities and initiatives measures.…”

“…Looking at microeconomic analyses, it seems that progress was obtained in environmental performance through digital technology and institutional regulations for the environment (Khan H. et al, 2021). On other hand, macroeconomic analyses suggest that a healthy ecosystem could generate good environmental services for society (Lai and Chen, 2020), government effectiveness positively impact energy consumption (Haider et al, 2021), the use of renewable energy improves sustainability by controlling oil consumption (Yu et al, 2022), and foreign direct investments should be used in sustainable businesses only for enhancing sustainability (Khan et al, 2022). However, there is still a gap in regarding the link between indices and indicators that look at different environmental, social, or economic features.…”

“…The study of Lai and Chen (2020) is extremely important as they avoid the problem of weighted components of HDI and EPI. More precisely, they emphasize the cross relationship among individual dimensions of EPI and HDI, proving that the education is the main factor that affect environmental management and that promote environmental sustainability.…”

How does financial inclusion affect environmental degradation in the six oil exporting countries? The moderating role of information and communication technology

“…The first finding reveals that the impact of economic development, captured by the human development index, on carbon intensity is significant across all quantiles, with the EKC hypothesis being confirmed for all quantiles in models 1-4, concurring with (Lai and Chen, 2020;Hussain and Dey, 2021;Li and Xu, 2021). There is strong statistically significant support for the EKC hypothesis for all countries.…”

The Impact of Economic Growth on the Human Development Index in Jambi Province in 2004-2019

“…Through human development, people get the opportunity to get a decent life so as to optimally increase their capacity to participate in development [3]. Maqin and Sidharta [4] in their literature review explain that people's choices can be increased through population empowerment, namely improving basic human skills that will increase the level of knowledge, health and participation in economic, political, social and cultural activities. According to Dina [5], community capacity is not only determined by the level of knowledge and skills but is also determined by the level of wealth, attributes, and characteristics so that they can participate in economic activities.…”