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2016 Environmental Performance Index (EPI)
Abstract and Figures
The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks countries’ performance on high-priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems. Within these two policy objectives the EPI scores national performance in nine issue areas comprised of more than 20 indicators (see EPI Framework). EPI indicators measure country proximity to meeting internationally established targets or, in the absence of agreed targets, how
nations compare to one another.
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... Much of the debate revolves around basic, yet pivotal, definitions around the characteristics of access to water and sanitation, including, for example, potentially subjective notions of safety or affordability that vary significantly between geographies (Bain et al., 2012;Martnez-Santos, 2017;Herrera, 2019;Weststrate et al., 2019). To supplement the argument being made and as an alternative set of outcomes, other measures on the access to safe drinking water and safe sanitation from the environmental protection indices (EPI) by Hsu et al. (2016) were also used. Employing several indicators based on different methodologies increases the validity of the findings. ...
... Either way, omitting economic performance clearly biases the estimation. Therefore the subsequent additional controls include log GDP per capita (Hsu et al., 2016). The corruption coefficient is now smaller and GDP itself is a significantly positive driver for access to an improved water source across regressions, which is intuitive as wealthier economies can afford better infrastructure. ...
... Access to Safe Sanitation: From Hsu et al. (2016): "We measure unsafe sanitation as the proportion of a country's population exposed to health risks from their access to sanitation, defined by the primary toilet type used by households. Adequate sanitation facilities help to reduce and prevent fecal pollution from entering the environment, thereby reducing the transmission of diseases. ...
Access to water and sanitation services is still a major problem in many countries. While institutional performance is a key driver of underperformance, there is little attention as to where variations in institutions that affect service provision originate from. Major incisions in countries' institutional landscape that continue to echo through time were the onset and demise of colonial occupation. Despite its extensive repercussions, countries' colonial past and its effect on water and sanitation services is yet to receive the attention it deserves. We find that countries' colonial history is a significant driver of access to services. Distinct effects emerge among former French, British and Spanish colonies and in the rural and urban context, potentially rooted in the extent of administrative centralisation and (lack of) conservation of native institutions. This work demonstrates that different colonial legacies drive variations in present-day WASH services opening up avenues for further studies on the matter.
... Following the United Nations, sustainable development can be approximated by "human development" (Absalyamova et al., 2016;Murshed and Mredula, 2018) and "environmental performance" (Emerson et al., 2012). The former is defined as "expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value" (Human Development Report, 2001, p. 9). ...
... It is often measured by the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) published by the Center for Environmental Law and Policy of Yale University, in collaboration with Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) 3 . The EPI ranks 180 countries on 24 performance indicators including reduction in environmental stresses to human health, protection of ecosystems and natural resources, etc. (Emerson et al., 2012). ...
In order to add new evidences to the ongoing debate about whether corruption greases or sands the wheels of growth and sustainable development, this paper analyzes how the quality of governance may lead to non-linearity in the effect of corruption on three key variables that are growth, human development and environmental performance. Based on a panel data set of 65-85 countries of different development levels for the period 1996-2019, the estimation results of the Hansen (1999) threshold model for different indicators of corruption and governance from the World Bank and the International Country Risk Guide reveal that, for the developed countries with high governance quality corruption always hinders growth, human development and environmental performance (no thresholds exist). However, for developing countries-and for the whole sample-the results establish the existence of a significant threshold indicating that the impact of corruption on these three variables is a regime specific depending on the quality of governance. When the quality of governance is low, high corrupt countries achieve higher levels of economic growth, human development and environmental performance, which is consistent with the "grease the wheel" hypothesis.
... Scholars have extensively investigated ecosystem services and developed various assessment systems and quantitative methods to measure sustainable development. These include the Human Development Index (HDI) (Bhanojirao, 1991;Lind, 2019), Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) (Env ironmental Sustainability Index, 2002;Bui et al., 2019), and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) (Emerson et al., 2012;Pinar, 2022), among others. In evaluating urban ecosystem service functions, a range of methods and indicator systems have been employed, with common approaches including physical measurements (Dai et al., 2021), value-based evaluations (De Groot et al., 2010;Zhou et al., 2020), and emergy analysis techniques (Odum, 1996;Guan et al., 2022). ...
A comprehensive understanding of the spatiotemporal changes and influencing factors of ecosystem service levels is crucial for regional sustainable development and coordination. The Yellow River Basin faces challenges such as ecological degradation due to uneven regional burdens. This study constructed an ecosystem service evaluation framework based on five dimensions. A combined weighting model was used to assess the ecosystem service levels, spatiotemporal characteristics, and influencing factors of nine provincial capital cities in the Yellow River Basin from 2010 to 2020. The results indicated that: (1) There were notable differences in ecosystem service levels among cities in the Yellow River Basin. The first category of cities, rich in tourism resources, exhibited high ecosystem service levels. The second category of cities, currently undergoing industrial green transformation, urgently needed to achieve a balance between economic development and ecological protection. The third category of cities faced challenges due to poor socioeconomic conditions and limited resources. (2) Resource and energy use, Ecological environmental protection, and Socioeconomic development were the most significant dimensions influencing ecosystem service levels. (3) Indicators such as per capita disposable income, per capita road area, urban green coverage, electricity consumption per unit of GDP, and the number of higher education institutions had a considerable impact on ecosystem service levels. This study suggests optimizing the energy structure, promoting clean energy development, supporting industrial green transformation, and strengthening infrastructure to enhance and protect ecosystem services in the Yellow River Basin.
... All the indicators are scaled from 0 to 100 with O being the farthest from the target and 100 being the closest. Weights of indicators are generally set according to the quality of the underlying data, as well as an indicator's relevance or fit for assessing a given policy issue and finally it is aggregated in the form of weighted sum(Hsu et al., 2017). (see https://epi.envirocenter.yale.edu/). ...
... The annual Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report (Hsu 2016) indicates that Vietnam is one of the nations with some of the worst air pollution in the world. The air quality of major cities, particularly that of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the country's capital, has been reported to be unhealthy. ...
The rapid decline in air quality across Southeast and Western Pacific Asia is occurring at an accelerated pace due to population growth and industrial development. The region’s Meteorological factors, including the monsoon seasonality, exert a significant influence on air pollution levels, particularly concentrations. In this study, we employ a statistical modeling approach to derive daily levels from meteorological parameters in five major polluted cities: Lahore (Pakistan), Delhi (India), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Hanoi (Vietnam), and Shanghai (China). The incorporated meteorological parameters are wind speed, barometric pressure, temperature, and rainfall, which are known to affect air pollution levels from 2020 to 2022. The statistical modeling was based on the comparative analysis of 35 different machine learning (ML) regression techniques with the purpose of selecting the algorithms most efficient for reconstructing and predicting levels from meteorological variables alone. Specifically, each ML regression model was trained to reconstruct daily levels in 2020–2021, and then used to reconstruct both missing daily levels in 2020–2021 and forecast the whole of 2022 using only the 2022 meteorological records. The results indicated that most of the daily and seasonal variability in daily levels could be reconstructed from meteorological conditions. However, the performance of the various ML models (as assessed by Root Mean Square Error tests) exhibited considerable variability. Among the tested models, the Ensembles Boosted Tree ML method demonstrated optimal efficiency during the training period (the first 2 years, 2020 and 2021) and it also was highly efficient in predicting the third year (2022) using only meteorological data. Additionaly, the Trilayer Neural Network ML method was found the most effective at reconstructing the data after 3 years of training and may therefore be preferred to fill in short periods of missing data. In contrast, our comparative analyses showed that the traditional multi-linear regression models under-performed in both constructing and predicting data. This study demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of assessing multiple ML regression methodologies for selecting which ones better perform for reconstructing the data of interest (in our case records) from their hypothesized constructors (in our case meteorological parameters). In particular, this study has highlighted the utility of using ML regression techniques for forecasting air quality and reconstructing missing pollution data, which is crucial for policy-making across South-East and Western-Pacific Asia regions, where only limited pollution monitoring infrastructure are available.
... In the 2000s, air pollution in Korea has consistently remained at high levels. According to the environmental performance index by Hsu et al. (2016), Korea ranks eighth in terms of worst air quality out of the 180 countries assessed. Korea is one of the countries with the highest per capita consumption of vegetables in the world. ...
Air pollution can lead to people engaging in avoidance actions. People may limit their time spent outdoors to minimize the health hazards linked with air pollution. Consequently, when severe air pollution causes these behavioral changes, both outdoor and indoor stores may experience the impacts of air pollution. This study estimated the impact of air pollutant on retail vegetable prices (i.e., the total impact of air pollutants on the demand and supply of vegetables) for large discount stores, supermarkets, department stores, and traditional markets in Korea. To this end, we examine the weekly data of 590 Korean retailers during the period from 2015 to 2019, employing both static and dynamic panel approaches. The results indicate that an increase in air pollutants, such as particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, would lead to a decrease in vegetable prices in the short run and the long run across all types of stores we considered, meaning that deteriorating air pollutant levels could potentially result in decreases in vegetable prices not only in outdoor stores but also in indoor stores. Therefore, we suggest that initiatives to reduce air pollution and improve air quality should be further strengthened to prevent the adverse effects of air pollution on the food market.
... The EPI demonstrates sustainability level by using a set of 40 indicators across 11 issue categories and three policy objectives, namely, climate change, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality (Wolf et al., 2022). In the previous editions of EPI, India ranked 168 in 2020 and performed best in 2016, with a rank of 141 out of 180 countries (Hsu et al., 2016;Wendling et al., 2020). In addition, the Climate Risk Index (CRI), measuring exposure and vulnerability to extreme events, ranked India as the seventh most vulnerable country to climate change in 2019 out of 180 countries (Eckstein et al., 2021). ...
Governance indicators influence and shape policy processes. The need for exploring how governance indicators lead to efficient policy responses is a long‐drawn debate in the field of policy studies. While existing literature is mostly from developed world, there is a dearth of empirical evidence from developing countries like India. As cities continue to remain the fulcrum of economic growth despite the much‐argued development model practised across India, it remains to be seen how governance indicators determine policy processes in cities. Adapting United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific's (UNESCAP's) module on eight governance indicators we studied the policy process of three diverse climate change‐linked environmental issues ‐ air pollution, dengue, and extreme heat, from three urban Indian metropolis ‐ Delhi, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad, respectively. We used a semi‐structured questionnaire to interview 33 stakeholders. We coded interview findings and formulated a color‐coded matrix to highlight the importance of governance indicators by environmental issues. Transparency, accountability and participation played an important role in shaping policy processes. The importance of other governance indicators varied due to diversity in administrative structures across three cities. Our study's findings highlight a complex relationship between governance indicators and policy processes linked to the environmental issues. Our study shows that the relevance of governance indicators in shaping policies around environmental issues is determined by the nature of the environmental issue and the structure of governance. In addition, our study adds four new indicators, governance structures, capacity building, informality, and gender‐inclusivity, which influence policy processes.
... Per capita GDP is used as an alternative/complementary proxy for the level of affluence. The quality of the environment is operationalized by use of the Ecological Performance Index (EPI) (Hsu et al., 2016;YCELP, 2016). The 2016 version of the EPI ranks national environmental performance based on 20 indicators across two overarching areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems. ...
Taking its point of departure in the questions of why workers unionize and what happens when they do, this dissertation studies trade union effects on public perceptions and attitudes through the lens of two overarching themes: conflict between management and workers, and tensions between immediate sectional interests versus broader political agendas. These themes are explored empirically through four research papers, studying (1) how union membership, union density, and institutionalization affect perceptions of conflict between management and workers; (2) the impact of trade unions at the workplace level as antecedents of job demands, job autonomy, job control, and training; (3) how union membership and collective bargaining coverage relate to workers’ willingness to prioritize environmental protection above growth and jobs, and; (4) whether and if so how the association between union membership and support for government spending on environmental protection varies internationally based on the level of economic development and environmental performance. Each study draws on extant data from largescale cross-national attitudinal surveys, using multi-level analysis (MLA) to study union effects at several analytical levels. While the studies are cross-sectional, limiting the ability to make strong causal claims, the empirical results indicate that trade unions ameliorate perceptions of management-worker conflict; augment perceptions of job autonomy and control, particularly where demands are high; and transcend immediate sectional interests in favour of broader long-term agendas related to environmental protection. The present overview locates the empirical studies in a broader theoretical context pertaining to the two overarching themes and elaborates on the causal mechanisms underpinning the research hypotheses.
... So far, nine different indices of sustainable development have been created, comprising the Change in Wealth Index (CWI), Ecological Footprint (EF), Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), Genuine Savings Index (GSI), Global Well-Being Index (GWI), Happy Planet Index (HPI), Human Development Index (HDI) and Sustainable Society Index (SSI), each index being assessed as having just a relative ability to measure the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable development (Strezov, Evans and Evans 2017, 244). Hsu et al. claimed that the environmental performance indexes increase rapidly in nations with low wealth as gross domestic product per capita increases, and then slows down (Hsu, et al. 2016). Likewise, Wending et al. created a argued that the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has a linear relationship with states' gross domestic product per capita (Wending, et al. 2018). ...
This research paper aims to raise awareness of the unconditional need to facilitate and soothe the transition toward sustainable development in developing countries, through an adequate political approach and through effective regulatory measures and policies. Moreover, this paper seeks to shed light on a relatively understudied by the mainstream relevant thinkers, region of the Eurasian continent, more precisely – Eastern Europe (former Soviet Union states). And finally, the case study of the present work attempts to break the language barriers and to give a starting point for future study developments of the concerned region which is often overlooked due to the fact that the English language “dominates global scientific activities as a lingua franca”.
Purpose
This study is grounded within the investigation on understanding how perceived health concern (PHC) and perceived environmental concern (PEC) of consumers lead to switching their consumption preference from conventional to organic food consumption (OFC), considering the mediating impact of purchasing intention (PI). Further, the moderating roles of perceived awareness (PA), anticipated pride (AP), moral obligation (MO) and relative consumption (RC) are assessed in the proposed framework.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed conceptual framework is tested through a mediation and moderated-mediation analysis (SmartPLS 4.1) of data collected from 420 consumers from five major representative districts of Odisha, namely Khordha, Gajapati, Sambalpur, Balasore and Anugul within the time frame of January to March 2024.
Findings
The research findings indicate that in the presence of PI as a mediator the relationship between PHC with OFC ( β = 0.459) and PEC with OFC ( β = 0.151) is stronger in comparison to the direct relationship between them. Further, results are also consistent with the moderated mediation model as all the moderators are significantly related to the mediating path.
Practical implications
The empirical insights of the study can substantiate key contributions for policymakers, suggesting that health-centered initiatives, improved food labeling standards and greater social visibility of organic products can effectively boost OFC among consumers.
Originality/value
The novelty of the study lies in laying the foundation for introducing the construct RC as a moderated mediator in the proposed model for gaining empirical insights along with emphasizing the significance of the collective impact of proposed moderators and mediators on OFC.
Fisheries data assembled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that global marine fisheries catches increased to 86 million tonnes in 1996, then slightly declined. Here, using a decade-long multinational 'catch reconstruction' project covering the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world's maritime countries and the High Seas from 1950 to 2010, and accounting for all fisheries, we identify catch trajectories differing considerably from the national data submitted to the FAO. We suggest that catch actually peaked at 130 million tonnes, and has been declining much more strongly since. This decline in reconstructed catches reflects declines in industrial catches and to a smaller extent declining discards, despite industrial fishing having expanded from industrialized countries to the waters of developing countries. The differing trajectories documented here suggest a need for improved monitoring of all fisheries, including often neglected small-scale fisheries, and illegal and other problematic fisheries, as well as discarded bycatch.
Governments have agreed to expand the global protected area network from 13% to 17% of the world's land surface by 2020 (Aichi target 11) and to prevent the further loss of known threatened species (Aichi target 12). These targets are interdependent, as protected areas can stem biodiversity loss when strategically located and effectively managed. However, the global protected area estate is currently biased toward locations that are cheap to protect and away from important areas for biodiversity. Here we use data on the distribution of protected areas and threatened terrestrial birds, mammals, and amphibians to assess current and possible future coverage of these species under the convention. We discover that 17% of the 4,118 threatened vertebrates are not found in a single protected area and that fully 85% are not adequately covered (i.e., to a level consistent with their likely persistence). Using systematic conservation planning, we show that expanding protected areas to reach 17% coverage by protecting the cheapest land, even if ecoregionally representative, would increase the number of threatened vertebrates covered by only 6%. However, the nonlinear relationship between the cost of acquiring land and species coverage means that fivefold more threatened vertebrates could be adequately covered for only 1.5 times the cost of the cheapest solution, if cost efficiency and threatened vertebrates are both incorporated into protected area decision making. These results are robust to known errors in the vertebrate range maps. The Convention on Biological Diversity targets may stimulate major expansion of the global protected area estate. If this expansion is to secure a future for imperiled species, new protected areas must be sited more strategically than is presently the case.
The only available data set on the catches of global fisheries are the official landings reported annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Attempts to detect and interpret trends in these data have been criticized as being both technically and conceptually flawed. Here, we explore and refute these claims. We show explicitly that trends in catch data are not an artifact of the applied method and are consistent with trends in biomass data of fully assessed stocks. We also show that, while comprehensive stock assessments are the preferred method for evaluating single stocks, they are a biased subsample of the stocks in a given area, strongly underestimating the percentage of collapsed stocks. We concur with a recent assessment-based analysis by FAO that the increasing trends in the percentage of overexploited, depleted, and recovering stocks and the decreasing trends in underexploited and moderately exploited stocks give cause for concern. We show that these trends are much more pronounced if all available data are considered.
This paper analyzes the transportation fatality risk in the United States. The analysis is in two parts. The first part compares the relative risks of the different modes based on data for the decade from 2000 to 2009. The second part is a time-series analysis for each mode using annual data from 1975 to 2010. By almost any measure, transportation is considerably safer now than it was in the mid 1970s. The improvement is especially noticeable for commercial modes such as aviation, railroads and maritime. Even the risks from private highway driving have halved during the past thirty-five years.
Stocks of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) have been declining over much of the North Atlantic for the past 30 years, owing to a combination of overfishing and adverse changes in their environment. In a previous study, environmental effects were introduced as an extra parameter in the stock-recruit relationship, where they act as a multiplier, independent of the level of spawning-stock biomass (SSB). Using a non-parametric pooled analysis of all cod stocks on the European Shelf south of 62 degrees N, it is shown here that environmental variability (as represented by the North Atlantic Oscillation) only has a significant effect on recruitment when the spawning stock is low. This has implications for fisheries management strategies, and for rates of stock recovery, which will be very dependent on environmental conditions. (c) 2004 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Water is an essential resource for life on Earth and available freshwater resources are emerging as a limiting factor not only in quantity but also in quality for human development and ecological stability in a growing number of locations. Water quality is a significant criterion in matching water demand and supply. Securing adequate freshwater quality for both human and ecological needs is thus an important aspect of integrated environmental management and sustainable development. The 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) published by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University includes a Water Quality Index (WATQI). The WATQI provides a first global effort at reporting and estimating water quality on the basis of five commonly reported quality parameters: dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, pH value, and total nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations. This paper explains the motivation and methodology of the EPI WATQI and demonstrates how hot-deck imputation of missing values can expand its geographical coverage and better inform decision-makers on the types and extents of water quality problems in the context of limited globally comparable water quality monitoring data.