Happy Planet Index
Views
From Wikiprogress.org
The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an innovative index able to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives.
The HPI is best conceived as a measure of the environmental efficiency of supporting well-being in a given country. Indeed, it shows that doesn’t exist a reliably connection between increasing high levels of resource consumption and high levels of well-being but that it is possible to produce high well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources. It doesn’t reveal ‘happiest’ country in the world, but it is able to explain the relative efficiency with which nations can convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.
Such efficiency could emerge in a country with a medium environmental impact and very high well-being, but it could also emerge in a country with only mediocre well-being, but very low environmental impact.
Contents |
How to measure the HPI
The global HPI can be described through three measures: the life satisfaction, the life expectancy and ecological footprint.
Measures of life satisfaction and life expectancy are two important measures that highlight the essential issue on how we ensure our well-being now will affect others around the world to secure also their own well-being, and whether any of us can do so in the future. But, they don’t analyse the means with which they do this, or of the inputs required.
The ecological footprint of an individual is a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all their resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to absorb all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume. This approach estimates the total amount of productive hectares available on the planet. Dividing this by the world’s total population, we can calculate a global per capita figure on the basis that everyone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources.
Using these components the HPI is a function of its average subjective life satisfaction, life expectancy at birth, and ecological footprint per capita or better, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.
Happy Planet Index = (Happy life Years/Ecological Footprint + α)*β
HPI in figure
HPI by sub-region
References
The Happy Planet Index - report
