16/10/2019 - Environment | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 5 years

KEY POINTS

· The world still looks at human progress in almost exclusively economic terms.

· The United Nations Development Programme tried to produce a more nuanced measure of progress by including life expectancy and education along with income in its Human Development Index (HDI).

· The original HDI is still relatively crude, failing to account for such things as sustainability and inequality.

· After the UN added an inequality-adjusted index (IHDI) to its 2018 Human Development Report. Including inequality as a factor dramatically altered countries’ rankings.

· The US, for instance, fell from 13th on the original index to 25th on the adjusted one. By contrast, Finland rose from 15th to fifth place.

· Accounting for climate damage would likely have an even bigger impact. Countries that rank high on the human development index also use more carbon and deplete more natural resources than those below them.

· Metrics favour unsustainable, environmentally damaging growth. (Using more energy also produces a higher ranking, but only up to roughly 100 gigajoules per person; beyond that, countries are wasting energy in inefficient systems, not improving human development.)

· Up to the middle of the list, where around 140 mostly low- and middle-income countries sit, the footprint is relatively small, less than 2 global hectares per capita (a measure of the world’s global ecological capacity per person).

· So we need a new development index, one that takes account of various environmental variables such as CO2 emissions per capita, SO2 emissions (a measure of air quality), groundwater extraction and share of renewable energy.

· The World Bank has introduced the concept of adjusted net savings to measure changes to wealth (a stock) rather than GDP (a flow), while accounting for additions or depletion of natural capital.

· But, the measure doesn’t adequately address the huge stock of accumulating CO2, SO2 or methane in the atmosphere, the country-sized swarms of plastic now floating in the oceans or the melting of glaciers—all things that show we may be at an environmental tipping point.

· If we want real action on climate, we now need to include damage to the environment and depletion of natural resources as factors in measuring development.