A new Environmental Performance Index using analytic hierarchy process: A case of ASEAN countries

Rapid development and increasing number of population may indicate a good sign for nation’s development. However, development sometimes brings negative side effect particularly from environment performance perspective. Environmental Performance Index (EPI) had been introduced since 2006 to depict the environment performance for most of the countries in the world. The index considers ten policy categories associated with environmental public health and ecosystem sustainability. The main mathematics operation in establishing EPI is arithmetic mean of all ten policy categories. One of the weaknesses in the arithmetic mean is the mathematics operation might neglects some extreme values in data. This paper proposed a new EPI using a decision making tool of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Pair wise comparison scales in AHP were utilized to set new EPI for nine ASEAN countries. A new ranking EPI among ASEAN countries showed that Brunei was the highest EPI followed by Singapore. The new ranking may offer an alternative measure in evaluating environmental performance particularly for ASEAN countries.