A new index

As the GDP goes up, what does it signify? How does it translate into our lives? Into how many lives, more importantly? Is it time to shift to some other index – like the Happy Planet Index?

The HPI was launched in 2006 as a marked departure from GDP and identified health and a positive experience of life as universal goals, besides natural resources. It combines three targets - high life expectancy, high life satisfaction, and a low ecological footprint. The ultimate efficiency ratio, it takes into consideration carrying capacity of the planet.

The second version has just been released with improved data from 143 countries. Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to the HPI index.

Unique in the world for having combined its ministries of energy and the environment back in the 1970s, a staggering 99 per cent of its energy comes from renewable sources. In 1997, a carbon tax was introduced on emissions – with the funds gained being used to pay indigenous communities to protect their surrounding forests. Deforestation has been reversed, and forests cover twice as much land as 20 years ago. In 2007, the Costa Rican Government declared that it intended to become carbon neutral by 2021.

The US with its affluent lifestyle figures way below in the index, and that is largely owing to its BIG eco-footprint which requires more than 3 planets to sustain!

HPI is claimed to be a much better way of looking the success of countries than through standard measures of economic growth. The HPI shows, for example, that fast-growing economies such as the US, China and India were all greener and happier 20 years ago than they are today.

The HPI goes to prove that it is possible to live long, happy lives with much smaller ecological footprints than the highest-consuming nations.

In a telling commentary, the report recalls how British economist John Maynard Keynes thought that, by the end of the twentieth century, people would be working two days a week thanks to the great productivity increases he was seeing. He assumed that, rather than producing more to keep everyone in work, we would simply work fewer hours and take the benefits of increasing productivity as increasing leisure time. How could he have known that humanity would choose instead to continue working longer hours so as to produce and consume products that do not enhance our well-being, whilst ravaging our finite and precious natural resources?

Are we simply producing more and more of what we do not need? At the expense of the environment? Care to share your thoughts?