New Country Ranking on Wide Environmental Impacts

Three scholars have released a new ranking of countries by their environmental impact. The study, released in an open-access journal uses new metrics to measure the overall impact more than 170 countries have on their environments.

The researchers, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Xingli Giam, Navjot S. Sodh, have affiliations with top universities in Australia, Singapore, and the United States. Compared with some other reports that focus simply on CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, this study incorporates a far wider range of impacts, including deforestation, marine captures (fishing, etc.), fertilizer use, water pollution, and threatened species.

The paper gives us rankings of best and worst countries on two scales: their absolute impact, and their impact proportional to "total resource availability" in the country. This means the "proportional" rating corrects not for population or for per-capita GDP, but for the resources they could potentially impact.

After the jump, the ratings. The best is at the top, the worst at the bottom. See the paper for the full list.

And a map. Proportional impact (top) and absolute impact (bottom).

You can be forgiven for not being surprised that many of the absolute smallest environmental impacts come from very small countries, but the "ten worst" ratings are more interesting.

The study has a few quirks that make it difficult for us to interpret. First, you might object that these measures are meaningless without correcting for population, income, and other factors. The researchers do, however, show us how countries perform in terms of their ability to protect the environmental resources available to them. The researchers also showed that higher income (PPP-adjusted GNI) correlated higher proportional impact and that higher total population correlated with higher absolute environmental impact.

The most gaping hole comes here as a result of this study's failure to take into account what they call "leakage," or international trade and transnational processes. They claim they just don't have the data, to which I say maybe they should work with this sort of study. They even acknowledge that in one of their measures, deforestation, transnational factors have distorted some numbers.

Costa Rica’s recent reduction in deforestation rate appears to have been offset by increasing timber imports from elsewhere, and Japan’s maintenance of its forest is supported by extensive timber imports from South East Asia and beyond.

Nonetheless, add this study to the stack of ways to view the division of global responsibility for our environment. Understanding the sources of negative impact on the environment is a key step in cooperative efforts to defend it.

Image credit: Lestari at Wikimedia Commons

Map credit: Bradshaw CJA, Giam X, Sodhi NS (2010) Evaluating the Relative Environmental Impact of Countries. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10440. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010440