EVALUATING DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE USING ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND CLIMATE CHANGE PERFORMANCE INDICES

Environmental performance has been an important indicator of economic sustainable development.Monitoring environmental performance and health outcomes can provide a better understanding of the relationship between the environment and human health, helping to shape a more sustainable and healthier future.This study aims to assess the environmental efficiency of European Union (EU) countries through the ecological footprint and climate change performance indices.A window slack-based measurement approach, using the net capital stock, labor, and energy consumption as inputs, climate change performance index and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the desirable output, and ecological footprint as undesirable output within the framework of data envelopment analysis, is employed to evaluate the dynamic environmental performance of EU countries from 2007 to 2019.To further explore the improvement of environmental performance in EU countries, the Global Malmquist-Luenberger index method is applied over the observation periods.Our results offer key insights into the environmental performance of EU countries and their advancements toward sustainable economic development.