Friday, January 29, 2010
A quick look to the index published today shows that it's all Europe. But where are the Baltics? Going though the ranks one can see that while Latvia is doing just great, Lithuanian and Estonian performance lags behind the region on average.

21 Latvia 72.5
37 Lithuania 68.3
57 Estonia 63.8
The index has two main components divided into sub components. Of the main components, state of environments seems to be rather fine in Baltics, from Lithuanian 74,3 to Estonian 76,9 (out of 100). However, the ecosystem variable shows really some variation: fro Latvian 79,3 to Estonian 50,4. While Latvia and Lithuania are ranked into a group of less industrially developed countries with vast natural resources, Estonia bundles with the industrial world - and this is perhaps visible in the ecosystem variable. When compared to each other, it seems Lithuania has issues with fishing, biodiversity and availability of water, and Estonia has poor air quality and high emissions. This is pure speculation, but perhaps the Estonian figures somehow reflect the use of oil shale in energy production and Lithuania on the other hand has very limited seashore and water flows only in dirty rivers coming mostly from Belarus.

However, I thought the ranking is very partial and does not give even slightest support for developing countries to keep on doing the good work with environment. On the other hand, it does not take anyhow into consideration how industrial countries have countless methods they could use to curb the emissions and health the world - that is money - and how the smaller ones cannot perhaps afford all the latest environmental technology, if they are even short of the basics like food and water.


Thus, A quick recalculation: EPI/log10(gdpcap07). Let's "standardize" the result of efforts to availability of methods, so to say. I removed Serbia/Montenegro due to missing data.

New results:  old result in parenthesis

New top:
Nepal 1 (38)
Costa Rica 2 (3)
Congo DR 3 (106)
Zimbabwe 4 (127)
Iceland5 (1)


Old top:
Iceland 5 (1)
Switzerland 10 (2)
Costa Rica 2 (3)
Sweden 11 (4)
Norway 43 (5)

Old bottom:
Sierra Leone 152 (162)
Central-African Rep 151 (161)
Mauritania 155 (160)
Angola 158 (159)
Togo 142 (158)

New bottom:
UAE 162 (151)
Bahrain 161 (144)
Eq. Guinea 160 (145)
Qatar 159 (121)
Angola 158 (159)

Significant leaps  (over 70 ranks)
Zimbabwe +122 
Congo DR +102
Burundi +95
Eritrea +91
Malawi +83
Mosambique  +81
Guinea-Bissau +77

Significant falls (over 55 ranks )
Luxembourg -81
Singapore -70
The Netherlands -64
USA -63
Canada -62
Brunei -62
Australia -59
Denmark -58

Baltic Sea Region
Sweden 11 (4)
Latvia 45 (21)
Finland 57 (12)
Belarus  64 (52)
Germany 70  (17)
Lithuania 72 (36)
Denmark 89 (31)
Poland 93 (62)
Estonia 100 (56)
Russia 103 (68)

The new ranks show the countries with lot of money but little relative effort, as well as the poor ones that showing some effort. Of the BSR, One can notice how it was earlier practically divided by West-East division (as the whole EPI). The new calculation, where the ability (assuming GDP per capita is more relevant that GDP itself - GDP per capita tells relatively the amount of usable money per person, while GDP just shows a lump sum) comes in, seems that only a few countries do what they really could do.  Baltics kept their order even in the new calculation, and seems the majority of Baltic Sea Region countries still are on the plus side (above rank 81) in the world. Just shame on Denmark!

Original EPI: http://epi.yale.edu/

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