Abstract

Water and land are essential elements for life that are becoming more and more threatened, hindering their availability for some. The development of measuring tools for water and land consumption is becoming increasingly important to guarantee their appropriate management. In this study, we compare and examine the contribution of some indicators to the environmental sustainability performance of countries. These indicators can play a number of roles in the sustainable policy process. In particular, environmental indicators can help illuminate issues by reducing complexity and diagnosing problems through the analysis of trends or correlations with other indicators, helping analysts discover patterns within and across units of analysis. The research proposes a multiple regression model to test and quantify the contribution of ecological and water footprints to the Environmental Performance Index. Given the results obtained from this study, we can affirm that, in the development of indices related to the environmental sustainability of countries, the weight of the water resource is not adequately considered. As well, the empirical result of the relation between the Environmental Performance Index and the Ecological footprint may appear unexpected because high Environmental Performance Index values for countries are related to high resources consumption.