Source: GLOBE-Net
Jan. 29, 2010   ShareThis

Davos, Switzerland - Iceland leads the world in addressing pollution
control and natural resource management challenges, according to the
2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by a team of
environmental experts at Yale University and Columbia University. This
is the third edition of the EPI, which has been revisited biannually
since 2006.
Released today at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010, the EPI
ranks 163 countries on their performance across 25 metrics aggregated
into ten categories including: environmental health, air quality, water
resource management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry, fisheries,
agriculture, and climate change.
Occupying the bottom five positions are Togo, Angola, Mauritania, the
Central African Republic, and Sierra Leone -impoverished countries that
lack basic environmental amenities and policy capacity.
The United States places 61st in the 2010 EPI, with strong results on
some issues, such as provision of safe drinking water and forest
sustainability, and weak performance on other issues including
greenhouse gas emissions and several aspects of local air pollution.
This ranking puts the United States significantly behind other
industrialized nations like the United Kingdom (14th), Germany (17th),
and Japan (20th). Over 20 members of the European Union outrank the
United States. The United States' ranking does not reflect the recent
policy activities of the Obama Administration, as the 2010 EPI builds
on data from before 2009.
Of the newly industrialized nations, China and India rank 121st and
123rd respectively - reflecting the strain rapid economic growth
imposes on the environment. However, Brazil and Russia rank 62nd and
69th, suggesting that the level of development is just one of many
factors affecting placement in the rankings.
The 2010 EPI report provides a detailed analysis for each country,
showing its performance on each of the 25 basic indicators, the ten
core policy categories, and the two over-arching objectives of
environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. In addition, each
nation is benchmarked against others that are similarly situated with
groupings based on geographic regions, level of development, trading
blocs, and demographic characteristics. These peer group rankings make
it easy to highlight leaders and laggards on an issue-by-issue basis
and to identify 'best practices.'
Analysis of the policy drivers underlying the 2010 rankings suggests
that income is a major determinant of environmental success. At every
level of development, however, some countries achieve results that
exceed what would be anticipated, demonstrating that policy choices
also affect performance. For example, Chile, where substantial
investments in environmental protection have been made, ranks 16th,
while its neighbor, Argentina, which has done much less to improve its
pollution control and natural resource management, lags in 70th place.
Regulatory rigor, the rule of law and good governance, and the absence
of corruption also show strong correlations with high EPI scores.
'The 2010 EPI shows the potential for a much more analytically rigorous
approach to environmental decision making, but substantial investments
in indicators that are systematically tracked and transparently
displayed will be needed.'
The Environmental Performance Index builds on the best data available
with indicators drawn from international organizations, such as the
World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,
as well as research groups such as the World Resources Institute and
the University of British Columbia. But many of these data sets are
based on reporting by national governments that is not subject to any
external review or verification.
And incomplete data resulted in the exclusion of dozens of countries
 from the 2010 EPI. 'High-quality data combined with appropriate
statistical analysis can certainly help policymakers identify problems
and trends, hone preferred policy approaches, and more effectively
leverage public investments in environmental protection,' said Jay
Emerson, professor of statistics at Yale and one of the leaders of the
2010 EPI effort. 'However, the conclusions that emerge are only as good
as the underlying data. We are firmly committed to further improvements
in data quality,' he added.
Marc Levy, deputy director of Columbia's Center for International Earth
Science Information Network and one of the EPI project leaders, further
observed, 'For some critical issues such as water, international
investments have actually decreased in recent years.'Union, including
the United Kingdom (14th), Germany (17th), and Japan (20th). Canada
dropped 44 places (46th) and China fell 16 places (121th)
The index looks at ten categories including: environmental health, air
quality, water resource management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry,
fisheries, agriculture, and climate change. It draws on data from
groups including the World Bank, the UN Development Program, the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change.
The newly released index is based on data collected before 2009,
failing to reflect any new green initiatives from the Obama
administration. Moreover, changes in methodology mean that researchers
are unsure if the US fell in rankings due to a policy change or because
of a change in data entry.
The study's researchers admit that the data itself is incomplete and
murky. 'We have better statistics on baseball,' Christine Kim, a Yale
researcher who is the project's program manager, said in a telephone
interview with the Christian Science Monitor. 'This science is
imperfect, it's murky, but it helps give some kind of gauge.'
Ms. Kim says researchers still lack the ability to rigorously measure
some simple green indicators such as deforestation. 'We're using
pre-historic tools, basically,' she says. As such, Kim says, the US
should not necessarily copy all environmental practices of Cuba even
though the Caribbean island is ranked 9th in the green index. But while
imperfect, Kim says the data provides a starting point for countries to
scrutinize their environmental performance.
'The ranking is a sexy lure for the media and for policymakers to pay
attention, because indices get attention,' Kim says. 'And then you look
under the hood and ask; why is my neighbor doing better than me?'
Iceland's top-notch performance derives from its high scores on
environmental public health, controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and
reforestation. Other top performers include Switzerland, Costa Rica,
Sweden, and Norway - all of which have made substantial investments in
environmental infrastructure, pollution control, and policies designed
to move toward long-term sustainability.
'At the Copenhagen Climate Conference last month, reliable
environmental performance data emerged as fundamental to global-scale
policy cooperation,' said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Yale Center
for Environmental Law and Policy and the Hillhouse Professor of
Environmental Law and Policy at Yale.
Serious data gaps, moreover, limit the ability to measure performance
on a number of important issues.