Enhanced data envelopment analysis for sustainability assessment

Assessing the level of sustainability of a system is challenging, since sustainability studies need to cover simultaneously a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects. In this work we explore the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the extent to which a system adheres to sustainability principles. We proposed an enhanced DEA, tailored to quantify the sustainability level attained by a system, which makes use of the order of efficiency concept to improve the discrimination power of the standard DEA. The capabilities of our approach were tested through its application to the assessment of electricity generation technologies in United Kingdom. The enhanced DEA shows clearly the ultimate distance to sustainability and could be a useful tool for decision and policy makers in order to move towards a more sustainable development.