Ethics Newsline®

“Switzerland Tops 2008 Environmental Scorecard at World Economic Forum”

Jan 28th, 2008 • Posted in: Research Report

United States ranks 39th, “significantly behind other industrialized nations”

From Yale University and Columbia University:

“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 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 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 provides a powerful tool for improving policymaking and shifting environmental decisionmaking onto firmer analytic foundations.

“The 2008 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 Index also provides ‘peer group’ rankings for each country showing how its performance stacks up against others facing similar environmental challenges. These benchmarks allow easy tracking of leaders and laggards on an issue-by-issue and aggregate basis. The data also support efforts to identify ‘best practices’ in the environmental realm.

“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 neighbor Nicaragua (77^th)….

“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 (14^th) and Japan (21^st)….”