Environmental Performance Index of 2010: Summary for Policymakers

Environmental sustainability has emerged as a critical policy focus across the world. Governments are increasingly being asked to explain their performance on a range of pollution control and natural resource management challenges with reference to quantitative metrics. A more data-driven and empirical approach to environmental protection promises to make it easier to spot problems, track trends, highlight policy successes and failures, identify best practices, and optimize the gains from investments in environmental protection. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals. This proximity-to-target methodology facilitates cross-country comparisons as well as analysis of how the global community is doing collectively on each particular policy issue. The EPI provides a framework for greater analytic rigor in the environmental domain but also reveals severe data gaps, weaknesses in methodological consistency, and the lack of a systematic process for verifying the numbers reported by governments. Likewise, the EPI makes vivid the need for better data collection, analysis, review, and verification as an essential underpinning for the trust required to make future worldwide policy cooperation effective. It also provides a model of transparency with all of the underlying data available online. One of the biggest weaknesses in the current framework is the lack of ability to track changes in performance over time. Thus, the 2010 EPI offers a pilot exercise – focused on a small handful of indicators for which time series data are available – designed to make clear the potential for highlighting which countries have gained the most ground and which are falling back, as well as the issues on which global performance is improving and those on which it is deteriorating. The 2010 EPI also identifies some of the critical drivers of good environmental results including the level of development, rule of law and good governance, and a robust regulatory regime. The overall EPI rankings provide an indicative sense of which countries are doing best against the array of environmental pressures that every nation faces. From a policy perspective, greater value derives from drilling down into the data to analyze performance by specific issue, policy category, peer group, and country. Such an analysis can assist in refining policy choices, understanding the determinants of environmental progress, and maximizing the return on governmental investments. More generally, the EPI provides a powerful tool for steering individual countries and the world toward environmental sustainability.