As many of you may have seen on a recent edition of Newsweek magazine (7-14 July), the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is a joint initiative between Yale’s Center for Law & Environmental Policy and Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network. According to Newsweek, “EPI aims to be a comprehensive assessment of the world’s environmental challenges and how individual countries are responding to them”.
I think the initiative is a great idea and would recommend a visit to their website, whose home page includes a Google Earth style graph showing the planet, allowing the visitor to take the environmental temperature of a region of their choice.
Right now, Switzerland is the greenest planet on earth, with an amazing score of 95.5 out of 100. Some of the countries with the worst scores are also some of the poorest countries in the world, such as Ethiopia. Niger, Ecuador and Cambodia. Such findings once again highlight the fact that the rich countries with a high score have an obligation towards those countries where environmental degradation is directly linked to their economic foes because, while the latter may score high in the standards established by the EPI (sanitation, protecting natural habitats, pollution, etc.), their populations consume much more and have a much higher carbon footprint.
EPI is what happens when you uncouple actual level of environmental impacts, by population or by raw numbers, and run it by country instead. The 25% climate change seems to be good but not the other ones.
I feel this is another intellectual: “Oh we in the west are doing all we can. We are so good. Let’s go help those poor people in africa”. While in raw numbers and/or weighted by population we pollute on the order of thousands to million times more.
I wish people, and especially intellectuals, would stop doing this kind of feel good stuff. We have a real problem and we need to deal with it.
Ecuador was ranked 22th ??? or not??