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Evaluating the Relative Environmental Impact of Countries
Bradshaw C.J.A., Giam X., Sodhi N.S. 2010. Evaluating the Relative
Environmental Impact of Countries. PLoS ONE 5(5):
e10440.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010440
Environmental protection is critical to maintain ecosystem services
essential for the human well-being. It is important to be able to rank
countries by their environmental impact so that poor performers as well
as policy ‘models’ can be identified. We provide novel metrics of
country-specific environmental impact ranks — one proportional to total
resource availability per country and an absolute (total) measure of
impact — that explicitly avoid incorporating confounding human health or
economic indicators. Our rankings are based on natural forest loss,
habitat conversion, marine captures, fertilizer use, water pollution,
carbon emissions and species threat, although many other variables were
excluded due to the lack of country-specific data. Of 228 countries
considered, 179 (proportional) and 171 (absolute) had sufficient data
for correlations. The proportional index ranked Singapore, Korea, Qatar,
Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Bahrain, Malaysia, Philippines and the Netherlands
as having the highest proportional environmental impact, whereas
Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia
and Peru had the highest absolute impact (i.e., total resource use,
emissions and species threatened). Read more here...
Groups: United Green Nations | Greeny Tweets | Modern Ukraine | Brand Ukraine Group
