Green Report Card Rates Countries, Highlights Shortcomings

"Jointly produced by Yale's Center for Law & Environmental Policy (led by Daniel Esty) and Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (led by Marc Levy), EPI aims to be a comprehensive assessment of the world's environmental challenges and how individual countries are responding to them. It is an effort to boil all the activities of a nation that relate to the environment down to a simple metric that runs from 100 (the greenest) down to zero (the least green). The Yale-Columbia team released the first complete version of the index in January, and it is the statistical backbone of this special issue on the world's most and least green nations."

"As one might expect, the overall rankings place small, wealthy Scandinavian societies at the top, and poor, war-torn African nations at the bottom. But one big surprise is that size is no excuse for poor performance; big and small nations occupy both the top and bottom ranks. And bigger surprises come when you compare nations with peers of similar income, or with neighbors. In the following pages, you'll find chapters on the best—and worst—nations in every income group: the rich, the middle class and the poor."

"China in particular has long argued that it is too poor to afford the Western luxury of environmental awareness. The EPI exposes this claim to be bogus. China ranks last among 15 nations in its income group (the fifth decile), behind Vietnam. If Colombia, the group's leader, can afford environmental concern, why can't China?"