The Happy Planet Index, a new measure of human well being and environmental impact was introduced by New Economics Foundations in July 2006. It supports GDP (gross domestic product) and HDI (human development index) to improve their defectiveness to take environmental factors into account. The results at least made you surprised, or shocking.

 

 

The new index, Happy Planet Index (HPI) has 3 important factors, life satisfaction, life expectancy, and ecological footprint, and the magic formula is a simple relation:

 

HPI = (Life satisfaction x Life expectancy)/ Ecological Footprint

 

Life satisfaction is obtained from surveys with questions such as: ‘If you consider your life overall, how satisfied would you say you are nowadays?’. It seems rather subjective, but this single question performs surprisingly well, showing good validity when compared with other national-level statistics. Life expectancy is the expectancy at birth, obtained statistically from a population.

 

Some experts believed that the product of Life satisfaction and Life expectancy is a measure which correlates well variables such as affluence, education, political freedom and gender equality, and hence is a good measure of well being. The third factor, Ecological Footprint, is the most neglected factor in previous studies, and is the main reason for the surprising results of the report. One would think that countries like the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan would do well, but in fact they don’t, and the reason is the Ecological Footprint. What is the Ecological Footprint?

 

It is a measure of a country’s consumption and its environmental impact. A country which needs a lot of resources from other countries to sustain its own well being has certainly a bigger big foot print than a self-sufficient country. A summary of the results:

 

As already mentioned, G8 countries fare very badly. The UK comes a disappointing 108 th (out of a total of 178 countries) – with the remainder of the G8 faring little, if at all, better. Italy is 66 th, Germany 81 st, Japan 95 th, Canada 111 th, France 129 th, United States 150 th and Russia 172 nd. Central America is the region with the highest average score in the Index

 

Island nations score well above average in the Index

 

These are the top 10 offenders of ecology:

1. United Arab Emirates 9.9

2. United States of America 9.5

3. Kuwait 9.5

4. Qatar 9.5

5. Australia 7.7

6. Sweden 7

7. Finland 7

8. Estonia 6.9

9. Bahrain 6.6

10. Denmark 6.4

Conclusions:

 

The above results should make us think, or rather rethink what happiness is.

 

We are all connected together, we are in the same boat, called the Earth. It is not possible for someone to say “I have money, I can do what I want, it is none of your business, and you have to respect my freedom to do what I like”.

 

At what cost are we willing to pay for our well-being?

 

How can we devise schemes so that usage of resources are fair to all, regardless whether they are small or large countries. The US government has refused to sign the Kyoto and the biodiversity conventions, instead they have waged wars, with a very thin moral foundation, and which have devastated large areas for a long time, apart from the brutal killings.

 

Consciousness about the Ecological Footprint must be stepped up. A quote from the report reads: “For example, in the United States and Germany people’s sense of life satisfaction is almost identical and life expectancy is broadly similar. Yet Germany’s Ecological Ecological footprint is only about half that of the USA. This means that Germany is around twice as efficient as the USA at generating happy long lives based on the resources that they consume.”

 

In economics, we have often stressed the meaning of productivity, a farmer in Denmark can produce single-handedly much more than a Chinese farmer. It is true, but we must also include the Ecological Footprint factor here, by considering how much machinery is being used, which in turn uses up resources of the earth, and causes pollution.

 

We need to improve the HPI formula to give a more accurate result. The individual measures of Life satisfaction, Life expectancy, and Ecological Footprint need to be perfected. References:

 

* New Economics Foundation web site

* Happy Planet Index

* Download report

* How HPI is calculated

* Country rankings