[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 71 (Wednesday, June 7, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1036-E1037]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    WORLDWIDE ENVIRONMENTAL RANKINGS: A USEFUL TOOL FOR POLICYMAKERS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 7, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to enter into the Record, 
information about the new Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranking 
that was researched by experts at Yale and Columbia Earth Institute, 
and revealed in the World Economic forum in Davos, Switzerland in early 
2006. ``The index draws on available data to measure 133 countries on 
16 indicators in six established policy categories: environmental 
health, air quality, water resources, and sustainable energy.'' EPI is 
the brainchild of Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for 
Environment Law and Policy and Hilhouse Professor of Environmental Law 
and Policy, who has high hopes for the project. An overarching score 
and ranking such as the EPI can be instrumental in drafting 
environmental policies. For example Haiti has an EPI of 114 whereas the 
Dominican Republic, a country of similar geography and natural 
resources, has a ranking of 54. A comparative analysis of these two 
countries would be extremely helpful to policymakers who are trying to 
improve the environmental standards of Haiti. EPI also provides an 
evaluation of the performances of the current governments in terms of 
their environmental standards. EPI is an excellent resource that 
encourages discourse and is a potentially useful tool for preparing 
environmental legislation.
  I would like to draw the attention of the Congress to this resource.

  Worldwide Environmental Rankings: Will Nations Compete To Be Green?

       At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in early 
     2006, a new global survey was unveiled that assigns a 
     numerical ranking to individual nations based on their 
     environmental practices and outcomes.
       The Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which has 
     prompted both praise and controversy in the international 
     environmental community, draws on available data to measure 
     133 countries on 16 indicators in six established policy 
     categories: environmental health, air quality, water 
     resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural 
     resources, and sustainable energy. A team of experts at Yale 
     and Columbia University's Earth Institute analyzed the data 
     to produce the rankings.
       The EPI is the brainchild of Daniel C. Esty, director of 
     the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and 
     Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy. Esty, a 
     member of RFF's Board of Directors, believes that it will be 
     a critical tool in bolstering successful pollution control 
     and natural resource management worldwide. (Full text of the 
     report and a summary for policymakers are available at 
     www.yale.edu/epi.)
       Resources asked Esty to explore the policy aims and 
     outcomes of the EPI with Senior Fellow Jim Boyd. Their 
     conversation follows.
       Boyd: Give me the big picture as a place to start. What was 
     your primary motivation for doing this? And how does your 
     ranking system relate to other performance measures, such as 
     national welfare accounting?
       Esty: Our goal is to shift environmental decisionmaking 
     onto firmer analytic foundations. We're trying to make 
     policymaking--across the full spectrum of pollution control 
     and natural resource management issues--more empirical, more 
     fact based, and more durable.
       One of our motivations was to provide a counterbalance to 
     the emphasis on GDP growth, which is taken so seriously, not 
     only by economists, but also by decisionmakers in government. 
     We believe the index provides a fairly clean and clear look 
     at current government performance across a spectrum of core 
     environmental challenges.
       Boyd: One of the things that will immediately jump out at 
     people is the fact that the United States ranks 28, not far 
     from Cyprus. That's a little surprising to me personally, but 
     how do you view that?
       Esty: When I present the EPI in the United States, people 
     are often surprised--even shocked--that the United States 
     ranks as low as 28. When I present the EPI in Europe, people 
     are often surprised--even shocked--that the United States 
     ranks as high as 28. The United States does very well on some 
     issues, like provision of drinking water--it really is 
     unsurpassed in the world in terms of the percentage of the 
     population that has access to safe water. But it does much 
     worse, if not quite poorly, on a range of other issues, like 
     greenhouse gas emissions. So, if you are sitting in America, 
     where the air looks pretty clear and the drinking water looks 
     pretty clean, you might say, gee, why aren't we closer to the 
     top? But in Europe, where people are very much focused on the 
     U.S. failure to step up to the climate change challenge, 
     people think the United States should rank about 130 out of 
     133 countries.
       Boyd: Certain things that you are measuring are more 
     amendable to control by government or society, while others 
     seem more like a country's natural resource inheritance, such 
     as its geography or climate. Are areas for improvement things 
     that all countries can act on--or are some countries stuck 
     with their bad environmental luck?
       Esty: All six of the core policy areas that we are looking 
     at represent important challenges that governments can be 
     held accountable for: the quality of their air, water, land-
     use, and biodiversity, how they manage productive natural 
     resources, habitat protection, and energy and climate change.
       Clearly, some governments are better positioned to hit the 
     established targets because of their underlying natural 
     resource endowments or, for example, because of their 
     relatively low population density so they don't strain the 
     resources of their land--a good example would be Sweden. But 
     are these things

[[Page E1037]]

     that governments should be looking at? Absolutely. Are 
     governments being held accountable for these things? All 
     across the board.
       Boyd: When you come up with a ranking like this, there's a 
     power in boiling it all down to that one number. Talk to me 
     about your philosophy of doing that versus disaggregating 
     what you have done and going deeper on the specific issues.
       Esty: What we found is that there is enormous power in 
     presenting a single, overarching score and a ranking related 
     to that. This is what attracts top-tier government officials, 
     presidents, ministers, and the media. Everyone loves 
     rankings, and everyone wants to know who is up and who is 
     down. From a policy point of view, however, that's just a 
     hook to draw people into a dialogue.
       What we are really excited about--and where I think we are 
     succeeding--is what comes after people look at that top-line 
     number, when they get a chance to drill down to the 
     underlying rankings that relate to the core policy categories 
     and even below that, to the issue-by-issue analyses that are 
     the foundation of the index. The rankings lure people into a 
     policy dialogue that can surface best practices that put some 
     nations nearer the top of the ladder.
       Boyd: Tell me your thoughts on how this work relates to the 
     Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, issued in 2005.
       Esty: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the EPI share 
     a common vision of a more data-driven approach to 
     environmental decisionmaking, where we really look at on-the-
     ground facts and results so that policy priorities can be 
     based on good information and good science. What 
     differentiates the EPI and gives it particular traction is 
     that it is aligned not on an ecosystem basis, like the 
     Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, but rather on a national 
     basis. National-state boundaries are the true lines of 
     accountability.
       In our index, where countries rank low, there's no ducking, 
     there's no hiding. The political officials find they are 
     called upon to answer for poor performance, and we think 
     that's a very powerful tool. No one wants to be at the bottom 
     of the rankings: every country would like to be higher up. We 
     made particular efforts to group countries with regard to 
     appropriate peers so that they are not ranking themselves 
     against the top of the spectrum, per se, but against others 
     that are similarly situated.
       Take Haiti, for example, which ranks really quite low on 
     our scale, at 114 out of the 133 countries we ranked. It's 
     not Haiti's job to figure out why it is not number 2, like 
     Sweden, or number 3, like Finland. But it is interesting, if 
     you are Haiti, to figure out why you are doing so much worse 
     than the Dominican Republic, at number 54. These are two 
     countries that share an island, that have a lot in common. 
     And obviously, something is going seriously wrong in Haiti 
     with regard to natural resource management and pollution 
     control. But for a poor country, the Dominican Republic is 
     doing quite well. So we think there is some learning there 
     for Haiti, and perhaps for the Dominican Republic as well, 
     because across 16 issues, there are probably some things that 
     Haiti is doing better.
       Boyd: Inherently this is a global data exercise. Comment on 
     the increasing availability of spatial data on environmental 
     conditions, but also about where a government, particularly 
     the U.S. government, stands on its ability to produce and 
     present information that people like you would find 
     useful.
       Esty: We are moving into an era of information-age 
     environmental protection, which is exciting. There is a great 
     deal of data that weren't out there before, which gives us a 
     much better handle on problems, the chance to track trends, 
     and a better basis for evaluating policies and understanding 
     what's working and what's not. Having said that, I think the 
     U.S. government still underinvests in producing relevant 
     data.
       Boyd: In that regard, how close a connection is there 
     between the top five countries in the ranking and the quality 
     of the data you are getting about those countries? Or is 
     there no correspondence?
       Esty: Much better data sets are available for the top 30 
     countries--basically the ones that are part of the 
     Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the 
     Paris-based, ``developed country'' think tank. Beyond that, 
     the data become very thin, and frankly, after about 130 
     countries, it becomes so thin that we can't include all the 
     countries that we would like. So if this move toward a more 
     data-driven approach to environmental protection is to gain 
     further traction, we are going to have to collect data on 
     many more countries. We are also going to have to go after 
     some issues that aren't tracked at all, not even in the most 
     developed countries. These include exposure to toxic 
     chemicals, waste management practices, releases of 
     SO2 and acid rain, recycling rates, lead and 
     mercury exposure, and wetlands loss.
       Boyd: In principle, a country could do poorly because it is 
     using its resources to produce commodities, like cutting 
     trees for lumber. How do you handle the fact that some of 
     those crops and therefore the benefits of that land use are 
     exported? In effect, you are measuring the negative 
     consequences in one country but countries elsewhere are 
     benefiting from that degradation. Is there any way to factor 
     that into your index?
       Esty: We took a hard look at this question in the context 
     of exporting dirty businesses and whether countries benefit 
     because someone else is willing to take up the challenge of 
     producing things like steel or aluminum. And it turned out to 
     be very difficult to get at that and hard to do consistently 
     with our model, which centers on the government's 
     responsibility for what it can achieve within its borders. 
     For example, the United States imports steel from Korea but 
     the numbers don't exist to allow us to shift some of the 
     public health and environmental burdens that Korea faces back 
     to this country. It's a weakness of the structure and means 
     that in some respects we haven't captured the full picture.
       Boyd: When you unveiled the index at the World Economic 
     Forum in Davos, what indications did you get that the 
     environment is present in the minds of these world leaders?
       Esty: It's a very exciting place to release a study because 
     you have lots of people producing reports, businesses 
     releasing statements, major world leaders talking about 
     critical questions, and business leaders like Bill Gates 
     speculating on the future of the information world. So the 
     competition for air space is tough. In that regard, we were 
     very pleased, first by the good turnout for the release in 
     Davos itself, and then, by the stories around the world in 
     the weeks that followed that came from more than 100 
     countries and appeared in more than 500 newspapers. To date, 
     there have more than half a million downloads of the report 
     from our website.
       Speaking more broadly, business leaders overseas take 
     environmental protection very, very seriously, incorporating 
     it into their operating strategies--it's one of their top 
     concerns, falling behind only globalization and competitive 
     strength. A dominant theme at Davos was the rise of India and 
     China and the enormous implications this will have, both 
     positive and negative. Obviously, it means that many, many 
     people will rising out of poverty, and hundreds of millions, 
     if not billions of new consumers will be driving the economy 
     of the world. But it also means vast consumption of natural 
     resources and potentially significant rats of pollution, 
     locally and at a global scale, threatening to exacerbate 
     problems like climate change.

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