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If the worldwide "Green Revolution" has an Achilles' heel, it is the inability to quantify overall environmental quality. After all, without hard numbers to measure and compare, how can we know if we're making progress toward environmental goals or falling further behind? Whether a tradeoff between reducing the use of pesticides and increasing the use of cultivated land prone to erosion makes environmental sense? Or which countries have the farthest to go in achieving a sustainable balance between their economic, social and environmental needs?
The missing link has been a comprehensive environmental indicator equivalent to what Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is to economics -- a single number that captures the state of the environment in a region and can be used to compare it with others.
Dubbed the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), a prototype of this all-important indicator will be unveiled Monday, Jan. 31 at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The prototype ESI was developed in a cooperative effort between the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University's Earth Institute, the Yale University Center of Environmental Law and Policy, and the Global Leaders for Tomorrow Environment Task Force of the World Economic Forum.
"For years now, big pronouncements about enhancing environmental sustainability have been made all around the world. But there has never been a reliable way of measuring performance, or holding people's feet to the fire," said Marc Levy, project team leader for CIESIN. "This prototype index appears to generate plausible and useful results, and represents a step in the right direction."
"One of the biggest motivations behind our effort is the need to inject substantive and impartial data into the global environmental decision-making process," Levy said.
As recently as December 1999, a report published by the National Research Council agreed, stating that "[Environmental] indicators are essential to inform society over the coming decades how, and to what extent, progress is being made in navigating a transition toward sustainability."
For all its importance as a first-cut environmental indicator, the method Levy and his colleagues used to construct the ESI prototype is deceptively simple. They defined 21 key factors indicative of environmental sustainability -- such as urban air quality, overall public health, and effective environmental regulation. Then they identified variables within each factor for which hard data is generally available from most countries -- like the level of sulfur dioxide in urban air, the infant mortality rate, and the percentage of land protected from development -- 63 variables in all.
A total of 56 countries were ranked on each variable (click here to see rankings), with the best performer receiving a score of 100 and the lowest performer a zero. For example, the countries with the highest and lowest infant mortality rates received zero and 100, respectively for that variable. The other countries received grades in between, based on their relative performance. All the individual grades for each country were then averaged to produce the final ESI number, just like test scores are averaged together for a final grade. Of course, data on all the variables was not available for every country. The solution? Make the number of variables for which a country had data the 64th variable.
"We felt it was important to keep this first attempt straight forward and transparent," said Dan Esty, team leader for Yale and overall project director. "At this point, all the variables carry the same weight so that value judgments about relative importance are at a minimum."
"After all, the main purpose of this prototype ESI is to stimulate international dialogue over what actually constitutes environmental sustainability, how it should be measured, and what policy levers drive it," Esty said, "not provide a definitive international ranking to determine environmental bragging rights. Tracking the index over time will enable countries both to assess their own progress, and recognize how they affect and can help their neighbors."
Nonetheless, the initial ranking does "confirm some basic intuitions," Esty said.
Norway came in first, followed closely by Iceland and the rest of northern Europe. Canada is up there too, with the United States falling in the middle of the upper half. Poorer, third-world nations comprise the bulk of the bottom half, with Vietnam coming in last.
This suggests that countries with explicit commitments to environmental quality generally scored higher, and that economic and political stability are generally conducive to environmental sustainability. "And that's really no surprise," Esty said.
The U.S., which scored very high in air and water quality, was pulled down by it's low ranking as large producer of greenhouse gasses and solid waste.
There were some surprises however, particularly regarding the relationship between economic vigor and environmental performance, Levy said.
Their analysis indicates no clear relationship between the growth rate of a country's economy and its ESI ranking. Some countries with high economic growth rates came in at the top of the environmental ranking, and some at the very bottom. Even more surprising, their comparison of ESI with economic competitiveness seems to support the well-known "Porter Hypothesis," which holds that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, and may even spur the atmosphere of innovation that supports it.
"Of course, our work thus far in no way proves this hypothesis," Levy said. "But it does suggest that sound economic and environmental policies are not mutually exclusive."
"The preliminary results are interesting and certainly merit further investigation. And that's what we hope to do over the next few years -- continue working to make the ESI as sophisticated, reliable and useful to the international community as possible."
NOTE: The full Pilot Environmental Sustainability Index Report is available for viewing as a PDF download with color graphics. The download web site is: http://www.ciesin.org/indicators/ESI/pilot_esi.html.
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