摘要：Today, very complex economic relationships exist between finance, technology, social needs, and so forth, which represent the requirement of sustainability. Sustainable consumption of resources, production and energy policies are the keys for a sustainable development. Moreover, a growing request in bio-based industrial raw materials requires a reorganization of the chains of the energy and industrial sectors. This is based on new technological choices, with the need of sustainable measurements of their impacts on the environment, society and economy. In this way, social and economic requirements must be taken into account by the decision-makers. So, sustainable policies require new indicators. These indicators must link economics, technologies and social well-being, together. In this paper, an irreversible thermodynamic approach is developed in order to improve the Human Development Index, <i>HDI</i>, with the Thermodynamic Human Development Index, <i>THDI</i>, an indicator based on the thermodynamic optimisation approach, and linked to socio-economic and ecological evaluations. To do so, the entropy production rate is introduced into the <i>HDI</i>, in relation to the CO<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mn>2</mn></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> emission flows due to the anthropic activities. In this way, the <i>HDI</i> modified, named Thermodynamic Human Development Index <i>THDI</i>, results as an indicator that considers both the socio-economic needs, equity and the environmental conditions. Examples of the use of the indicator are presented. In particular, it is possible to highlight that, if environmental actions are introduced in order to reduce the CO<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mn>2</mn></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> emission, <i>HDI</i> remains constant, while <i>THDI</i> changes its value, pointing out its usefulness for decision makers to evaluate <i>a priori</i> the effectiveness of their decisions.
