National Geographic Channel Earth Report: State of the Planet Airing internationally in April 2008, National Geographic Channel’s Earth Report: State of the Planet rates how nations have impacted our world – both positively and negatively – in 2007 using the Environmental Performance Index developed by Yale and Columbia universities.
Opening a new coal power plant every week, China surpassed the United States in total emissions for the first time. The Arctic polar ice cap is receding more than even the worst case scenarios had predicted, and countries are scrambling to stake their claim on the prized shipping route of an ice-less Northwest Passage. But, many countries are working to make a difference. China is investing U.S. $8 billion to build the ‘Green Wall of China’ – the world’s largest reforestation project stretching nearly 4,500 kilometres. The U.S. government will test storing carbon dioxide emissions underground – depositing more than three trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide beneath North America. Tracking everything from the 8 billion metric tonnes of carbon released in our atmosphere to the 11 billion trees toppled on land, Earth Report: State of the Planet offers a comprehensive environmental overview of 2007.
For specific tune-in information by country or for more information, please visit http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/intl/
- U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment, by Felicity Barringer (article)
The Environmental Performance Index has been released at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on Wednesday, January 23 at 3:00 pm local time in the Congress Hall Press Centre. Professor Dan Esty, one of the EPI’s lead authors, discussed the 2008 EPI rankings and analysis.
The report 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. 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 decisionmaking onto firmer analytic foundations.
Switzerland tops the rankings, while Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Costa Rica are awarded positions two to five, respectively. Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Niger occupy the bottom five positions.
The Environmental Performance Index aims to promote data-driven and analytically rigorous environmental decisionmaking by using the best global datasets available. Yet serious data gaps limit the ability to measure performance on a number of important issues, and the overall data quality and availability for some countries are poor. Incomplete data excluded 89 countries from the 2008 EPI.
“To address these gaps, policymakers need to dramatically ramp up their investment in environmental data, monitoring, indicators, and reporting,” declared Marc Levy, Deputy Director of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network and one of the EPI project leaders.
