A Methodological Triangulation of the Environmentally Sustainable Human Development Index (ESHDI) of the Tropical Montane Cloud Forest Area, Puebla, Mexico

This study analyses the Environmentally Sustainable Human Development Index (ESHDI) across 42 municipalities in Puebla, Mexico, which share the same predominant biome, in 2010 and 2020. The objective was to compare four methods for constructing synthetic indices—Geometric Mean (GM), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and two variants of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA-CCR and DEA-SBM)—to identify the approaches most consistent with the ESHDI’s multidimensional nature. Considering the dimensions of Health, Education, Income, and per capita CO2 emissions, the robustness of the classifications was evaluated using Kendall’s W, Spearman’s rho, and Kendall’s tau coefficients. The results reveal statistical convergence among the methods, as well as relevant structural differences in the weighting schemes and the generated rankings. While MG, ACP, and DEA-SBM assigned relatively balanced weights to the dimensions and produced similar rankings, DEA-CCR concentrated weights on the best-performing dimensions of each municipality, allowing a single dimension to exert a disproportionate influence on the aggregate index and compromise its multidimensional balance. Among the methods evaluated, DEA-SBM stood out for its ability to combine conceptual consistency with benchmarking capacity. In addition to measuring environmentally sustainable human development, the method enables the identification of reference municipalities, the establishment of realistic performance targets, and the diagnosis of specific inefficiencies in each dimension, thereby supporting the formulation of more effective and territorially contextualised public policies. The evidence reinforces the theoretical and empirical relevance of incorporating environmental sustainability into human development metrics and demonstrates that methodological choices in aggregation significantly influence the evaluation of territorial performance.