Environmental Assessment on Energy and Sustainability by Data Envelopment Analysis

15CONCEPTS

15.1 INTRODUCTION

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; http://ipcc.ch/index.htm), established by the United Nations (UN) environmental program, reported the policy suggestion in April of 2014 that it is necessary for us to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in particular CO₂, by 40–70% (compared with 2010) until 2050 and to reduce the level to almost zero by the end of the twentyfirst century via shifting our current systems to energy‐efficient ones. Otherwise, it warns that global warming and climate change will destroy our natural and socio‐economic systems. Consequently, we will have to face various risks (e.g., heat waves, droughts, floods and food crises, as well as damage to human, social and economic systems) on the earth. Consequently, we will lose our social sustainability whose current achievement requires managing economic developments and environmental protection in a similar way to synchronized swimming.

Although it is ideal to establish ecological societies without producing any GHG emissions, global warming and climate change have been influencing not only our social systems but also corporate behavior and operations in real business, because every private sector needs to change their business strategies to adapt various regulation changes on preventing industrial pollution.

It is easily imagined that such an environmental implication, as discussed above, is immediately applicable to organizations in public sectors, because ...