U.S. and India underperform in major environmental assessment

Air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to public health in the world today — even worse than water pollution, according to the 2018 Environmental Performance Index report. The report, which is released every two years, evaluates 180 countries’ performance on a number of environmental categories, ranging from conservation to pollution to public health. Each country is then assigned an EPI ranking — from best to worst.

Of note: The United States has the lowest EPI ranking of any Western country. On the opposite end of the spectrum, rapidly-industrializing India has sunk dramatically in the ranks, and is fourth from the bottom.

Key takeaways from the report released today, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

Socioeconomics: Unsurprisingly, countries with higher GDPs have higher EPI rankings: they have more resources to dedicate to conservation, public health and environmental protection. “That’s why we believe this ranking is particularly helpful when countries compare themselves to peer nations,” says Dan Esty, environmental law professor at Yale University and an author of the report, which is prepared by researchers at Yale and Columbia University.

But there are outliers, and studying what they’ve done right, or wrong, can help other countries decouple pollution from economic growth:

• Despite rapid industrialization, Taiwan and Singapore rank fairly high. This is a change for Singapore, which scored low in the first few iterations of the report. The government seems to have taken the warnings to heart, and re-vamped the country’s water system.
• The U.S. is ranked 28th overall, lower than any other Western country. This is due, in part, to reliance on fossil fuels and rising rates of deforestation. Although large chunks of land are federally owned, notes Esty, much of that land is still open to mining and logging.
• A number of Caribbean Islands have high rankings despite low resources. But they also rely on their environment for tourism.
• China used to be at the bottom of the index — but thanks to a new commitment to reduce smog and air pollution (and in turn reduce greenhouse gases) it’s now solidly in the middle.
• India has slipped from the middle to the bottom, as more people have purchased cars and industry has boomed. There’s little emphasis on sustainable development in India, says Esty, where the cities “are now more polluted than China.”
• Qatar has an extremely high GDP — but has more sulfur pollutants than any other country.

Air pollution: Air pollution is one of the leading causes of death around the world, but it harms the environment in more ways than one. Rising air pollution is bringing acid rain, which has virtually disappeared from U.S. forests, to other parts of the world. Pollutants are entering soil and lowering water quality, and others enter the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. And, pollution can drift from one country to another, which has led neighboring countries to adopt joint air quality agreements, like the U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement.

Deforestation: Although individual countries have made significant progress fighting deforestation (China, for example, has more forest cover than it has in past assessments), overall forests are in decline.

Wonky data: The report authors acknowledge the quality of data isn't consistent across nations. Some countries don't measure water or air quality, and there are other environmental factors, like wetlands health and abundance, for example, that aren't measured anywhere. Other countries are suspected of fudging their data, "Russia, for example, comes in at a much higher place than we think they really should. We think their data is systematically incorrectly reported, and that lets it be in 52nd place rather than lower," says Esty.

One thing to watch: Conservation is no longer based on anecdotes: environmental declines are meticulously mapped, modeled and analyze to create vast datasets. Although data are still spotty for some metrics in some countries, there is a larger trend to create measurable ways to monitor environmental decline —and recovery.