The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is the global association of some 200 companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development. Council's mission
is to provide business leadership as catalyst for change toward
sustainable development, to support the business licenses to operate,
innovate and grow in the world increasingly shaped by sustainable
development issues.
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...
by providing decision makers
with more detailed practical information and
tools to build the more secure, sustainable and affordable energy future. The new
publication (July 2010) will present:
Updated scenarios with greater regional
detail providing insights on which new technologies will be most important
in the different regions of the world, Sectoral deep dives highlighting the key
technological challenges and opportunities in each of the main
energy using sectors, Transition pathways
identifying the different barriers to accelerated deployment of the most important clean technologies with decisions how these barriers can be overcome.
