Drivers of environmental impact: A proposal for nonlinear scenario designing

Drivers of environmental impact are commonly studied in the related literature through the IPAT and STIPAT models. The first is an accounting model and the second is a stochastic approach that enables both statistical tests of significance of the drivers and the consideration of a larger set of drivers. These methodologies, however, are unable to take account of the level of all drivers in a nonlinear structure, i.e., different impacts according to the level of the variable. This paper presents a global Ordered Logistic Model that estimates the probability of four ordinal categories of environmental impact (four defined categories of Ecological Footprint). The results further the analysis of environmental impact offering an additional understanding of what to expect in terms of environmental pressure when the current level of the drivers are changing. The study demonstrates the proposed methodology by offering some examples of scenario analysis based on the estimated model.