Dispatch from Rio: Incorporating Sustainability into the Human Development Index
Shortly after I landed in Rio de Janeiro, I participated in a side event hosted by the Armenia government on “Sustainable Development Indices – possible options” at the 2012 Rio Earth Summit. In a previous post I mentioned the importance of metrics and indicators to help track progress toward the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of clearly defined objectives that were originally proposed by Colombia and are meant to get governments to pay attention to poverty eradication and environmental sustainability.
Armenia has been working since 1995 to transform the Human Development Index (HDI) into a Sustainable Human Development Index (SHDI). The HDI attempts to create a summary measure of human development across three basic dimensions of human development: health, education, and income. The HDI uses a single statistic to serve as a frame of reference for a country’s social and economic development. It sets a minimum and maximum for each dimension, called “goalposts,” and then gauges where each country stands in relation to the goalposts, normalized as a value between 0 and 1.
Using these same principles, Armenia set out to incorporate an environmental sustainability dimension into the HDI. Figure 1 shows a diagram of the environmental indicators incorporated into Armenia’s version of the SHDI. They’ve basically divided environmental indicators into two types: those relating to the environmental state of a territory; and those relating to the environmental evaluation of human activities. The next tier of 11 indicators relate to specific environmental issues, while some of those indicators are further defined.
Figure 1. Environmental indicator component of the SHDI. Source: Karine Danielyan, one of the presenters on the panel.
The structure and indicators included in Armenia’s SHDI bear a striking resemblance to what I was asked to present – the 2012 Environmental Performance Index (Figure 2), a joint initiative between the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) that ranks 132 countries on their environmental performance. Like Armenia’s SHDI, the EPI looks at environmental performance in two overarching objectives: environmental health and ecosystem vitality. We also include many of the same indicators as the SHDI, including access to water and sanitation, forest loss, and biodiversity protection. I was struck by how congruous our two efforts were, and how we face similar challenges in attempting to develop meaningful indices that provide a strong signal as to environmental performance and sustainability.
Figure 2. Indicator framework of the 2012 Environmental Performance Index.
Some of the key lessons I took from our panel that could help guide negotiators in their consideration of indicators and metrics for SDGs include:
- In developing indicator frameworks and indices, there is a tension between the “real” and the “ideal.” While ideally, indices would be comprehensive, data gaps limit the ability to measure an “ideal” picture of sustainability. In the case of Armenia, they were able to include indicators of waste management. At the global level, there aren’t complete datasets of national waste management statistics.
- A tension also exists between complexity and simplicity. In the YCELP-CIESIN experience, we’ve found that simplicity and clear policy signals matter when it comes to the practical applicability of something like the EPI to help policymakers understand areas in which they perform well, and areas in which they lag. YCELP and CIESIN’s first effort to produce an Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) contained 76 indicators covering multiple dimensions of sustainability was considered to be too complex. One single, aggregated number from 76 underlying indicators proved to be too weak of a signal for policymakers to truly understand how they were doing on environmental issues. Therefore, in 2005 we tightened the focus to only look at environmental performance and issues for which governments can be directly responsible. The Armenians, however, are working the other way – adding a sustainability dimension to the SHDI because they feel it is too simple and not comprehensive enough.
- Time series analysis is critical in revealing sustainability and environmental performance trends. The Armenians brought up the incorporation of time series data as an inevitable next step for their SHDI. We also arrived at the same conclusion after a decades’ work on indices. Therefore, for the first time, we collected time series data for each of the 22 indicators in the EPI and utilized the data in several ways:
- We used the full range of time series of data to determine policy targets for each indicator.
- We backcasted EPI scores and rankings for each country for the last decade.
- We used the time series data to evaluate the consistency and quality of data for each country, which many times led us back to the original data sources to check seemingly anomalous points.
- Most significantly, we produced a Pilot Trend EPI that ranked countries on their rate of improvement on the EPI over the last decade.
I hope that some of these lessons we – along with Armenia’s experience – will prove valuable when countries are tasked with the job of developing indicators to demonstrate progress toward SDG implementation. So far, mention of indicators and the need for metrics are peppered six times in the latest version of the negotiation draft, which is still being discussed hotly in Rio.
If we agree to “think globally” about climate destabilization and at least one of its consensually validated principal agencies, it becomes evident that riveting attention on more and more seemingly perpetual GROWTH could be a grave mistake because we are denying how economic and population growth in the communities in which we live cannot continue as it has until now. Each village’s resources are being dissipated, each town’s environment degraded and every city’s fitness as place for our children to inhabit is being threatened. To proclaim something like, ‘the meat of any community plan for the future is, of course, growth’ fails to acknowledge that many villages, towns and cities are already ‘built out’, and also ‘filled in’ with people and pollutants. If the quality of life we enjoy now is to be maintained for the children, then limits on economic and population growth will have to be set. By so doing, we choose to “act locally” and sustainably.
More economic and population growth are soon to become no longer sustainable in many too many places on the surface of Earth because biological constraints and physical limitations are immutably imposed upon ever increasing human consumption, production and population activities of people in many communities where most of us reside. Inasmuch as the Earth is finite with frangible environs, there comes a point at which GROWTH is unsustainable. There is much work to done locally. But that effort cannot reasonably begin without sensibly limiting economic and population growth.
Problems worldwide that are derived from conspicuous overconsumption and rapacious plundering of limited resources, rampant overproduction of unnecessary stuff, and rapid human overpopulation of the Earth can be solved by human thought, judgment and action. After all, the things we have done can be undone. Think of it as ‘the great unwinding of human folly’. Like deconstructing the Tower of Babel. Any species that gives itself the moniker, Homo sapiens sapiens, can do that much, can it not?
“We face a wide-open opportunity to break with the old ways of doing the town’s business…..” That is a true statement. But the necessary “break with the old ways” of continuous economic and population growth is not what is occurring. There is a call for a break with the old ways, but the required changes in behavior are not what is being proposed as we plan for the future. What is being proposed and continues to occur is more of the same, old business-as-usual overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the very activities that appear to be growing unsustainably. More business-as-usual could soon become patently unsustainable, both locally and globally. A finite planet with the size, composition and environs of the Earth and a community with the boundaries, limited resources and wondrous climate of villages, towns and cities where we live may not be able to sustain much longer the economic and population growth that is occurring on our watch. Perhaps necessary changes away from UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH and toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises are in the offing.
Think globally while there is still time and act locally before it is too late for human action to make any difference in the clear and presently dangerous course of unfolding human-induced ecological events, both in our planetary home and in our villages, towns and cities. If we choose to review the perspective of a ‘marketwatcher’ who can see what is actually before our eyes, perhaps all of us can get a little more reality-oriented to the world we inhabit and a less deceived by an attractive, flawed ideology that is highly touted and widely shared but evidently illusory and patently unsustainable.
http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=5690DE5A-B033-11E1-AB8D-002128049AD6
This situation is no longer deniable. Opportunities like the one offered at RIO+20 cannot be missed. During my lifetime, many have understood the Global Predicament we are facing now, but only a few ‘voices in the wilderness’ were willing to speak out loudly and clearly about what everyone can see. It is not a pretty sight. The human community has precipitated a planetary emergency that only humankind is capable of undoing. The present ‘Unsustainable Path’ has to be abandoned in favor of a “road less travelled by”. It is late; there is no time left to waste. Perhaps now we will gather our remarkably abundant, distinctly human resources and respond ably to the daunting, human-induced, global challenges before us, the ones that threaten life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation. Many voices, many more voices are needed for making necessary changes.
[...] measures of progress to complement GDP” so as to “better inform policy decisions.” See a previous post of how some countries and initiatives are working to define such metrics to incorporate [...]