Expedient Methods in Environmental Indexing

We call an Environmental Index an agglomeration of data compiled to provide a relative measure of environmental conditions. Environmental data is often sparse or non-random missing; many concepts, such as environmental risk or sustainability, are still being defined; indexers must balance modeling sophistication with modeling facility and model interpretability. We review our approaches to these constraints in the construction of the 2002 ESI and the UN Development Programme risk report.

This presentation, delivered at INFORMS2004, is a sketch of some work completed at CIESIN from 2001-2004 – where I spent two years as a gra. A paper has been submitted on diagnostics for multiple imputation used in the ESI. I hope to generate a paper on the bayesian network aggregation used in the risk index. I’m talking dec. 9th.