of global environmental leaders
Switzerland tops the global list of countries ranked by environmental performance,
according to the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by a team
of environmental experts at Yale and Columbia universities.
The 2008 EPI, released at the World Economic Forum in Davos, ranks 149 countries
on 25 indicators tracked across six established policy categories: Environmental
Health, Air Pollution, Water Resources, Biodiversity and Habitat, Productive
Natural Resources and Climate Change.
The EPI identifies broadly accepted targets for environmental performance and
measures how close each country comes to these goals. As a quantitative gauge
of pollution control and natural resource management results, the index was
created to provide firm analytical foundations for improving policymaking and
shifting environmental decision-making.
The next highest-ranking nations on the 2008 EPI are (in order) Sweden, Norway,
Finland and Costa Rica. Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Angola and Niger occupy
the bottom five positions.
The index also provides “peer group” rankings for each country
showing how its performance stacks up against others facing similar environmental
challenges. These benchmarks are designed to allow easy tracking on an issue-by-issue
and aggregate basis. The data also supports efforts to identify “best
practices” in the environmental realm.
“As the corporate sector has long understood, the ability to benchmark
performance provides an important spur to lagging performers and valuable guidance
on where to look for best practices,” observes Daniel C. Esty, director
of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Hillhouse Professor
of Environmental Law and Policy. “Every country has something to learn
from the 2008 EPI. Even the top-ranked countries underperform on some issues.”
Analysis of the drivers underlying the 2008 rankings
suggests that wealth is a major determinant of environmental success. At every
level of development, however, some countries achieve results that far exceed
their peers — demonstrating that policy choices also affect performance,
notes Esty. For example, fifth-ranking Costa Rica, known for its substantial
environmental efforts, significantly outperforms its neighbor Nicaragua, which
ranks 77th on the index. Nicaragua’s history of poor governance and political
corruption, violent conflicts and budgets skewed toward the military instead
of environmental infrastructure no doubt adds to the disparity, says Esty.
Top-ranked countries have all invested in water and air pollution control and
other elements of environmental infrastructure, and have adopted policy measures
to mitigate the pollution harms caused by economic activities. Low-ranked countries
typically have not made investments in environmental public health and have
weak policy regimes.
The United States placed 39th in the rankings, significantly behind other industrialized
nations like the United Kingdom (14th) and Japan (21st). The United States
ranked 11th in the Americas, and 22 members of the European Union outrank the
United States. The U.S. score reflects top-tier performance in several indicators,
including provision of safe drinking water, sanitation and forest management.
But poor scores on greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of air pollution
on ecosystems dragged down the overall U.S. rank.
“The United States’ performance,” says Gus Speth, dean of the
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, “indicates that the
next administration must not ignore the ecosystem impacts of environmental as
well as agricultural, energy and water management policies. The EPI’s climate
change metrics ranking the United States alongside India and China near the bottom
of the world’s table are a national disgrace.”
While the EPI draws on the best global datasets available, that information
is missing or inaccessible for some countries. As a result, 89 countries were
excluded from the 2008 EPI because of lack of available data. The absence of
broadly collected and methodologically consistent indicators for even the most
basic issues such as water quality — and the complete lack of time-series
data for most countries — hampers efforts to shift pollution control
and natural resource management onto more empirical foundations, says Marc
Levy, deputy director of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science
Information Network and one of the EPI project leaders.
“To address these gaps, policymakers need to dramatically ramp up their
investment in environmental data, monitoring, indicators and reporting,” notes
Levy.
The full text of the 2008 EPI and Summary for Policymakers is available at
http://epi.yale.edu.
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