The Environmental Performance Index 2008 was released this week (January 23). I happen to love charts, and the more interactive the better. The EPI 2008 is a new interactive format from the previous EPI 2006, and instead of having to download a ton of PDF files, you can roll your mouse over charts to your hearts content. However, you may be a bit dismayed by what you find. Even if you are living in Switzerland and your country just took over the top-spot from New Zealand since 2006, it is hard to get that excited about being number 1 when pollution and other environmental degradations know no national boundaries.

From the EPI press release:

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.

And...

The United States placed 39th in the rankings, significantly behind other industrialized nations like the United Kingdom (14th) and Japan (21st). The United States ranked 11th in the Americas, and 22 members of the European Union outrank the United States. The U.S. score reflects top-tier performance in several indicators, including provision of safe drinking water, sanitation, and forest management. But poor scores on greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of air pollution on ecosystems dragged down the overall U.S. rank. “The United States’ performance indicates that the next administration must not ignore the ecosystem impacts of environmental as well as agricultural, energy and water management policies,” said Gus Speth, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “The EPI’s climate change metrics ranking the United States alongside India and China near the bottom of the world’s table are a national disgrace.”-- EPI press release available at EPI 2008 website

Now the press releases are available in several languages, and I can read a little French and a little German, and it looks like the text is the same for all the languages. True, the lead authors are both Americans, but you would think that an international press release would not focus so heavily on the US. Would this press release have focused on the US's rank if the US had ranked highly, or is it more to draw attention to US hypocrisy in environmental issues? Hmm. Genetically-modified-food for thought.

The New York Times weighed in on the EPI 08, with an additional quote from a research associate of one of the lead authors, Daniel Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

Christine Kim, a research associate of Professor Esty’s, calculated that a country’s wealth, measured as gross domestic product per capita, tended to correlate with a strong performance on such indicators as sanitation, indoor air quality and success in combating diseases — but also with a poor performance on greenhouse gas emissions and agricultural policies. -- New York Times

Do I suggest that this Index is exhaustive and should be taken as gospel? No, on the contrary. Even the EPI press release acknowledges shortcomings.

The Environmental Performance Index aims to promote data-driven and analytically rigorous environmental decisionmaking by using the best global datasets available. Yet serious data gaps limit the ability to measure performance on a number of important issues, and the overall data quality and availability for some countries are poor. Incomplete data excluded 89 countries from the 2008 EPI. The absence of broadly collected and methodologically consistent indicators for even the most basic issues such as water quality – and the complete lack of time-series data for most countries – hampers efforts to shift pollution control and natural resource management onto more empirical foundations. -- EPI press release available at EPI 2008 website

But the EPI does show some disparities in certain countries that should gain some insight from seeing them ranked alongside other less developed countries (Hello, Belgium).

Then again, some happy surprises came up, delighting even the author (Esty in a Newsweek interview):

[Newsweek's Barrett Sheridan]Which countries surprised you in their placement? [Esty]:Costa Rica, by no means a rich country, is in fifth place, reflecting the fact it has taken environmental policy very seriously. It's committed to making [environmentalism] a cornerstone of the national identity. -- Newsweek

Please note that the Environmental Performance Index 2008 is still in its BETA form, so there are a few glitches in the site. It is hard to see some of the charts, but be patient, and hit on individual chart links and you will be able to access the sub-categories.