IDS Construção de um índice sintético de desenvolvimento sustentável para os municípios do estado do Ceará, Brasil

Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) not only has been considered as a fundamental concept in Ecological Economics, but also recommended by the United Nations institutions as a new regulatory paradigm for the human society that, in its search for higher material standards, has to adopt an ethics of respect for nature and future generations. Considerable effort has been done attempting to devise a novel measurement to guide decision-makers and governmental planning towards that goal. Building Sustainable Development Indices (SDI) is, however, an interdisciplinary activity, as the diverse (economic, socio-cultural, ecological) dimensions of the new development process ought to be considered. Studies on Sustainable Development Indices in developing countries are still poor. In Brazil, at present, the Statistics and Geography Brazilian Institute (IBGE) is still setting up the environmental data base, in order to be able to estimate this kind of indices, both for country or state levels. Aiming at summing up this effort and taking into account all possible dimensions of the sustainable development concept, a matrix of 206 original variables, later on transformed into 150 rates of growth, indices, coefficients, proportions and percentages, was built up for the 184 municipalities in the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil. The composite index was carried out according to the following steps: i) choosing guideline variables for the synthetic index; ii) selecting relevant variables through backward stepwise regression of each guideline variable upon all others; iii) applying the multivariate model of Factor Analysis to estimate orthogonal common factors; iv) building the municipal indexes as weighted arithmetic means, from the sum of factor scores weighted by the respective eigenvalues; v) ranking the municipalities according to their indices; and vi) defining municipal district groups by Cluster Analysis. The first step selected twelve key variables, being five of them related to the Human Development Index (HDI) and seven others to the environmental dimension. Step six resulted into six groups of comparative municipal levels of SD in which the municipalities were distributed (Figure 1 and Table 5), such as: worse (30 municipalities), very low (49), low (70), middle (30), high (4) and best level (1). According to step three, the results from both Varimax and Quartimax rotations emphasize the relevance of variables representing the educational population levels as conditions (causes or effects) for Sustainable Development. On the other hand, the prevailing low levels of economic development still reveal the significance of economic activities (energy, industry, animal husbandry, and agriculture) for this Brazilian Northeastern region (Figure 2). Obviously, the construction of this SDI may be improved, with wider matrices that best represent the reality complex relationships and theoretical discussions on sustainability indicators. Given that the SDI states a relative performance, the municipality better classified does not mean to have reached sustainability, but only that it is better off in a process of sustainability than the others after it. In any case, the SDI may indicate the municipalities mostly in need of attention from public policy and society in general.