Green Countries

By contrast, Tanzania, with a rank of 113, lands just ahead of the far-richer United Arab Emirates. Tanzania also ranks first among those nations in the poorest 10 percent. The reason has to do partly with the country's biological inheritance—it includes much of the wildlife-rich Serengeti Plain—but also a stable government that has guided development and controlled poaching and pollution.

Comparing countries of the same environmental type is another interesting way of slicing the data. Desert nations, for instance, have similar pressures and challenges—they must juggle limited water supplies with the needs of industry and farming, without harming fragile desert ecosystems. Although Israel doesn't score well compared with countries in its wealth class, it looks much better compared with desert nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which have more severe water problems.

In some cases, the Yale and Columbia researchers had to do some creative analysis. To assess how well countries are protecting biodiversity, they overlaid a map of national parks and other wildlife areas with satellite images showing how much development had encroached upon these regions, allowing them to identify which countries have kept protected areas truly wild (the United States, New Zealand and Botswana), and which had allowed their parks to suffer from human encroachment (Ireland, Denmark, Japan, India and South Korea). And with their "health ozone" indicator, the researchers had to rely on mathematical guesswork, based on satellite measurements, to get a rough sense of how smog-infested the world's cities have become. (While there are good comparative data on ozone, smog also includes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides and other components that are poorly tracked in most nations.) Among the best industrial countries were Malaysia, the United Kingdom and all of Eastern Europe (a legacy of the Soviet nuclear program). Among the worst offenders were Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the United States, Italy and Paraguay.

Where the data are thin, one reason is simple: embarrassment. Some countries simply lie or make up the facts. This was common practice among Soviet apparatchiks who, year after year, somehow always seemed to reach the industrial and environmental goals set forth by the Kremlin. Today's Russian bureaucrats may still be fudging its environmental figures. That's why Yale researchers are suspicious of Russia's shockingly strong performance against its economic peers (it ranks 28th overall, and high among nations of similar income). "I don't believe the Russian data," says Esty. "I believe it's still made up."

Brazil is another country whose high rank—34th—is deceptive. In many ways, Brazil is resting on its laurels. Decades ago it invested heavily in promoting biofuels (ethanol made from soy) and building hydropower dams. Brazil is a vast land blessed with an abundance of water, which yields energy relatively cheaply with no carbon emissions. These factors buoy Brazil's score, but in recent years, despite the exhortations of politicians, the country has been backsliding on the Amazon forest; last year, by design or neglect, the rate of clear-cutting jumped 18 percent. Because trees are a reservoir for carbon, cutting them releases carbon dioxide into the air, contributing to global warming. Brazil is now the world's fourth biggest emitter of carbon, mainly due to the felling of trees.

One conclusion to be drawn from the Yale-Columbia project is the need for better data, which requires funds. Acquiring high-quality data, especially in the developing world, is difficult. Although the technology involved is relatively simple and inexpensive, it has to be deployed over entire continents on a consistent basis. Because data collection and monitoring is not nearly as sexy an issue as, say, saving pandas or polar bears, support is not forthcoming. Without better information, policymakers can't craft good policies.

Experiences like the recent biofuels surge, which is driving up food prices, show how treacherous even well-intentioned decisions about the environment can be when they're uninformed. The same holds for consumers, who sometimes think paying somebody to plant a few trees will compensate for flying around the world in airplanes. For such decisions, data are essential. If we're going to avoid squandering our natural resources, the quicker we begin to rely more on facts and less on assumptions, the better.

© 2008