Environmental Performance of Island Countries A Basis for Best-fit Models of Environmental Sustainability

This paper analyzed several factors which could define environmental sustainability of island countries in the world: human development index (HDI), gross domestic product (GDP), green growth (GG), ecological footprint (EF), climate risk (CR), disaster risk (DR) and environmental performance (EPI) from their respective data banks. An exploratory data analysis was conducted to determine the relationship between the factors and EPI, and genetic algorithm was utilized to formulate regression models best-fit for such relationship. Findings from these models reveal that HDI, GDP, GG and EF have strong association with EPI, while CR and DR have weak association. This led to the conclusion that environmental sustainability of island countries is affected by the people’s environmental awareness and resource consumption, nation’s wealth and way of living, and economy’s green technology utilization. Effective environment education, government-private sector research collaboration and efficient implementation of environmental programs are recommended.

Keywords –environmental performance, island countries, environmental sustainability