Becoming Carbon Neutral in Costa Rica to Be More Sustainable: An AHP Approach
1
Department of Economic Analysis & ICEI, Complutense University of Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain
2
School of Economics, National University of Costa Rica, Heredia 86-3000, Costa Rica
3
Faculty of Economics and Business, Complutense University of Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(2), 737; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020737
Received: 12 December 2019 / Revised: 10 January 2020 / Accepted: 13 January 2020 / Published: 20 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainability as a Multi-criteria Concept: New Developments and Applications)
We propose addressing an organization’s adoption of an environmental certification as a multicriteria problem considering environmental sustainability as well as economic and strategic aspects. Our methodological approach uses the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which we use in an empirical application to analyze the adoption decision of several Costa Rican firms and institutions. Firstly, we select a set of economic, strategic, and environmental criteria that seem relevant for the organization’s direction. We select these criteria according to our literature review and a series of face-to-face interviews with scholars and companies’ managers. As an environmental certification, we focus on Carbon Neutral (CN), which is a domestic certification aimed at reducing or offsetting carbon emissions. For the sake of comparison, we also consider ISO 14001, which is a well-known international standard aimed at compliance with environmental norms. We conduct the AHP analysis using the answers given by 24 companies and institutions, which in aggregate terms, give CN a higher score than ISO 14001. This result is mainly due to the fact that CN ranks above ISO 14001 when attending to environmental sustainability, although ISO 14001 tends to be preferred in economic and strategic terms.
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Keywords:
Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP); carbon neutral; ISO 14001; multicriteria; economic-strategic; environmental sustainability; Costa Rica
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MDPI and ACS Style
André, F.J.; Valenciano-Salazar, J.A. Becoming Carbon Neutral in Costa Rica to Be More Sustainable: An AHP Approach. Sustainability 2020, 12, 737. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020737
AMA Style
André FJ, Valenciano-Salazar JA. Becoming Carbon Neutral in Costa Rica to Be More Sustainable: An AHP Approach. Sustainability. 2020; 12(2):737. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020737
Chicago/Turabian StyleAndré, Francisco J.; Valenciano-Salazar, Jorge A. 2020. "Becoming Carbon Neutral in Costa Rica to Be More Sustainable: An AHP Approach" Sustainability 12, no. 2: 737. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020737
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