I do not agree with this article due to the fact that most of the industrialized countries produce their pollution outside their own borders. most of them should not merit to be placed as the greenest countries on any ranking! in a globalized world where transnationals ignore borders, such an EPI (Environmental Performance Index jointly produced by Yale's Center for Law & Environmental Policy and Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information Network) ranking may turn out to be even dangerously misleading, since most of the environmental damage is directly or indirectly tied to consume. due to this fact, it is actually countries like guatemala or cuba or costa rica that should rank as the most ecological countries, instead of switzerland who is actually as all the other rich industrialized countries a resources sink or in other world a consume paradise!!
ecological devastation and CO2 emissions have to be calculated different! this EPI point of view of the world is very old and to my opinion completely wrong. the only merit this study has, is the valuable information that was gathered and analyzed so as to perform these rankings! jet these numbers should be viewed per capita! if these nice numbers were to be computed similar as ???individual CO2 footprints??? and multiplied by the inhabitants of any country of the world, Switzerland inhabitants would find themself very low on a similar ranking, probably not so far from the Usa and other industrialized countries which actually indirectly pollute the world per capita much more than other countries like china etc.. imagine the Usa had as many inhabitants as china! many worlds would be needed to satisfy its needs! industrialized countries have to admit their responsibility in deforestation and pollution of the world, instead of changing the facts intelligently and pretend they are green!