Friday, September 05, 2008 Peña: Environmental Performance By Rox Peña E-ssue
THE 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) of selected countries (the Philippines included) was released early this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The report was made by the Yale Center Environmental Law and Policy and the Columbia University Center for the International Earth Science Information Network.
The EPI ranks 149 countries on 25 indicators tracked across six established policy categories: Environmental Health, Air Pollution, Water Resources, Biodiversity and Habitat, Productive Natural Resources, and Climate Change.
Heading the list is Switzerland, with a score of 95.5 followed by Sweden, Norway, Finland, Costa Rica, Austria, New Zealand, Latvia, Colombia and France in the top 10. At the bottom (#140 to 149) are Guinea-Bissau, Yemen, Dem. Republic of Congo, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Angola and Niger.
The Philippines was at 61st place with a score of 77.9. We cannot match the environmental budgets of economic giants, thus this rank is not really an "apple to apple" comparison. The more reasonable assessment is the EPI ranking according to "peers," that is according to regions and according to income group.
In the Asia Pacific Region consisting of 23 countries, the Philippines ranked No. 9, with New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Thailand in the upper 8.
We performed better than Vietnam, Indonesia, China and India. The Philippines placed 55th in the 2006 EPI, but its score then was only 69.4.
The EPI identifies broadly-accepted targets for environmental performance and measures how close each country comes to these goals. As a quantitative gauge of pollution control and natural resource management results, the Index provides a powerful tool for improving policymaking and shifting environmental decision-making onto firmer analytic foundations.
Some policy conclusions that can be useful to policy makers are:
* Environmental challenges come in many forms. Some issues arise from resource consumption and pollution associated with economic activity. In this regard, developed countries or nations that are industrializing face the most severe harms.
Other threats derive from a lack of basic environmental amenities. With regard to these issues, developed countries have greater capacity to make the needed investments while developing nations face significant funding constraints.
* Wealth correlates highly with EPI scores. But at every level of development, some countries achieve results that exceed their income-group peers (example is Costa Rica (5th) significantly outperforms its neighbor Nicaragua (77th).
Statistical analysis suggests that good governance contributes to better environmental outcomes.
* Top-ranked countries have invested in water and air pollution control and other elements of environmental infrastructure and have adopted policy measures to mitigate the harms caused by economic activities.
Low-ranked countries generally have not made investments in environmental public health and have weak policy regimes.
There's a detailed report per country which can be viewed in the EPI's website.
