Environment Details

A healthy environment is sometimes dismissed as a luxury for the rich. But people cannot live without a healthy environment. And poor nations have weaker infrastructures and fewer social services than rich countries, making the results of climate change all the more damaging. A study co-authored by CGD senior fellow David Wheeler predicts that a two-meter sea level rise would flood 90 million people out of their homes, many of them in the river deltas of Bangladesh, Egypt, and Vietnam.

The environment component looks at what rich countries are doing to reduce their disproportionate exploitation of the global commons. Are they reining in greenhouse gas emissions? How complicit are they in environmental destruction in developing countries, for example by importing commodities such as tropical timber? Do they subsidize fishing fleets that deplete fisheries off the coasts of such countries as Senegal and India?

Finland tops this year’s environment standings. Its net greenhouse gas emissions fell during 1996–2006, the last ten years for which data are available. Also high is Ireland, whose economy grew 6 percent per year faster in the same period than its greenhouse gas emissions; Norway, which has the lowest net greenhouse gas emissions rate per capita thanks to expanding forests; and the U.K., which has steadily increased gasoline taxes and supported wind and other renewable energy sources. Spain finishes low as a heavy subsidizer of its fishing industry while Japan is hurt by its high tropical timber imports. The United States is the only CDI country that has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the most serious international effort yet to deal with climate change. That gap, along with high greenhouse emissions and low gas taxes, puts the United States second from the bottom. South Korea comes in last as the highest user of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer and largest major importer of wood from tropical countries.

For more, go Inside the Index.