The Happy Planet Index
The New Economics Foundation has just released the third version of its global Happy Planet Index (HPI).
The Happy Planet Index measures what matters: the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, lives for the people that live in them, within environmental limits.
The video below provides a useful overview.
I’ve written before about the need to move beyond measures like GDP to measures of sustainable prosperity. The HPI approaches this challenge by pulling together measures of life expectancy, experienced well-being and ecological footprint, instead of gross economic activity. It ranks countries based on how many long and happy lives they produce per unit of environmental input.
So what does the data show? The two images below from the full report give the best overview of the global data. The first shows the global distribution of the index on a world map and the second plots the index results as Happy Life Years vs Ecological Footprint. I particularly like the second image, because it shows the direction we need to go. We need more countries to move into the green zone, either by reducing their ecological footprint or improving their well-being and life expectancy.
You can see that the Western World generally scores well on life expectancy and well-being but poorly on ecological footprint. Whereas Sub-Saharan Africa is the other way around — low ecological footprint and low happy life years. Latin America as a region is doing pretty well on both measures, and Costa Rica currently leads the Happy Planet Index.
Australia is ranked 76th — a poor showing. While we are 8th on well-being and 4th on life expectancy, we are an abysmal 143rd on ecological footprint. The message is clear — rich countries like Australia buy their standard of living at the expense of the natural world. But there is also a hopeful message because the technologies and practices do exist to greatly reduce our ecological footprint without diminishing our standard of living. So let’s hope Australia can lift its game next year!
