United States / Switzerland | A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialised nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list. Switzerland tops the global list of countries, according to the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by a team of US environmental experts at Yale University and Columbia University.
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 ranks Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Costa Rica two to five, respectively. Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Niger occupy the bottom five positions. The United States placed 39th in the rankings, significantly behind other industrialised 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.
Belgium (78.4) continues to rank near the bottom of the 28 European nations compared to the last study released in 2006. ‘Belgium remains a shock,’ says Professor Daniel Esty, the report’s lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. He says the heavily industrialised country, driven by centuries-old ethnic quarrels, was 57th among the 149 nations. ‘Of those ahead of them, only 10 are richer,’ he adds.
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. For example, Costa Rica (5th), known for its substantial environmental efforts, significantly outperforms its neighbour Nicaragua (77th). 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.
‘Switzerland is the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world,’ Daniel Esty says, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks. ‘To address all these gaps, policymakers need to dramatically ramp up their investment in environmental data, monitoring, indicators, and reporting,’ declares Marc Levy, Deputy Director of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network and one of the EPI project leaders.
Acknowledgement
The full text of the 2008 EPI and Summary for Policymakers is available at http://epi.yale.edu
