The Happy Planet Index: An index of sustainable well-being Centre for Well-Being, nef (the new economics foundation), UK

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is a measure of sustainable well-being, or the ecological efficiency with which nations achieve their levels of well-being. It was developed by nef (the new economics foundation) in July 2006 as a headline indicator of progress. The first report presented HPI scores for 178 countries across the globe. Since then, nef has also produced a European HPI, in 2007, and a second global report in 2009. A third global HPI report is due in 2012.i

Measuring what matters In the last few years, a proliferation of alternative, or Beyond GDP, indicators have emerged, as well as various governmental and supra-governmental initiatives, all with differing goals. The intention of the HPI is to provide a simple and transparent headline indicator of how well a nation is doing in terms of two things: 1) people‟s well-being today 2) impact on the environment (and by implication, possibilities for future well-being)

The goal, of course, is to maximise people‟s well-being today, whilst minimising the resulting impact on the environment. This is not dissimilar to the definition of sustainable development developed by the Brundtland Commission as that which: “Meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”ii.

Many proposals have been put forward for measuring people‟s well-being, but most are unsuitable for creating a single headline indicator as they involve many dimensions, which are hard to integrate. The HPI identifies two dimensions which are ends in themselves – health and experienced well-being, that is, how well someone feels their life is going. Of course other factors are important to people‟s lives, such as employment, education or good governance. But all these factors are means for achieving something else. It makes sense to ask someone why they want a good education, but it doesn‟t make sense to ask someone why they want to be happy, or why they want to have a long life. These are universally intrinsic goods – things that people across the world want for their own value, not because they lead to something else. Other intrinsic goods may exist for some people, such as religious belief, but they are not as universal. Measuring environmental impact must also be central to measuring progress. We cannot be said to be doing well if the entire population is happy and healthy, but are consuming resources in such a way that their children will be condemned to far worse conditions. Conceptually, therefore, the HPI is a measure of input-output efficiency – it indicates well- being produced per unit of resource consumption.

Figure 1: A model of societal goals and resources

At around the same time as the creation of the HPI, the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) called for a metric capable of measuring “the production of human well-being (not necessarily material goods) per unit of extraction from or imposition upon nature”iii.

How the HPI is calculated Health and experienced well-being are operationalised using Happy Life Years, a metric developed by Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven. This metric adjusts national average life expectancy by an mean reported experienced well-being; it is modelled on the well-known medical indicator Healthy Life Years. In the 2009 report, the main source of data for experienced well-being, was the question on satisfaction with life used in the Gallup World Polliv: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”v

Where this was not available, the World Values Survey, or an alternative question found in the Gallup World Poll (called Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale, or the ladder of life), were used. The denominator, resource consumption, is the Ecological Footprint per capita, developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, and calculated by the Global Footprint Network.vi This is expressed in terms of the land area required to support the consumption in a nation, based particularly on food, natural resource consumption, and carbon emissions. The measure takes account of “embodied” consumption of goods that are consumed in one country having been produced elsewhere. The HPI involves a couple of minor adjustments so as to ensure that neither half of the question dominates the results, and so as to generate results that range from 0 to 100.

What the HPI shows

Figure 2: Ecological footprint and happy life years, 2005

HPI Life Life rank Country Sat Exp EF HPI 1 Costa Rica 8.5 78.5 2.3 = 76.1 2 Dominican Rep 7.6 71.5 1.5 = 71.8 3 Jamaica 6.7 72.2 1.1 = 70.1 6 Colombia 7.3 72.3 1.8 = 66.1 9 Brazil 7.6 71.7 2.4 = 61.0 20 China 6.7 72.5 2.1 = 57.1 35 India 5.5 63.7 0.9 = 53.0 43 Netherlands 7.7 79.2 4.4 = 50.6 74 UK 7.4 79.0 5.3 = 43.3 114 USA 7.9 77.9 9.4 = 30.7 143 Zimbabwe 2.8 40.9 1.1 = 16.6

Table 1: Happy Planet Index and subcomponents for selected countries (colours represent performance in comparison with key thresholds)

Looking across the results from the 143 nations included in the second compilation of the HPI, undertaken in 2009, no country manages to achieve high well-being whilst living within its means. On the one hand, there are rich Western countries which succeed in producing high levels of well-being, but at a huge environmental cost. On the other, there are poorer developing countries, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, that are doing very well in terms of living within their environmental means, but are not achieving high well-being by any stretch of the imagination. Looking at Figure 2, and Table 1 showing the performance and ranking of selected countries, it is clear however that one region does particularly well – Latin America. Costa Rica has the highest HPI with, in fact, the highest Happy Life Years worldwide, and an Ecological Footprint which is only marginally above what WWF calls „one-planet living‟ (2.1 g ha per capita, which would be one‟s fair share if everyone on the planet consumed the same amount of resources). Meanwhile, the highest ranking „developed‟ country is the Netherlands. Figure 3 shows the performance of selected OECD nations since 1960. The graph shows that there has been little clear progress across these countries and, in the case of the USA, a clear decline over time.

Figure 3: Happy Planet Index for selected OECD countries, 1960-2005

Implications of the HPI The HPI provides a compass to guide nations. But it does not, by itself, answer the question of how to get there. Nevertheless, it does provide a few clues. The 2009 report highlighted the following as paths to a happier planet: Redistributing work and reducing hours Expanding civil society and participatory democracy Lifelong learning and active lifestyles Shift towards active and public transport Scaling down businesses Redefining value and progress Technological development to increase resource productivity, not labour productivity

More information & References www.happyplanetindex.org www.neweconomics.org

i All reports are available at www.happyplanetindex.org. ii UN World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our common future (Oxford: OUP). iii Adams WM (2006) The future of sustainability: Re-thinking environment and development in the twenty-first century. Report of the IUCN Renowned Thinkers Meeting. iv Gallup World Poll (http://eu.gallup.com/poll/118471/world-poll.aspx). v World Database of Happiness (www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness). Item O-SLW/c/sq/n/10/a. vi Global Footprint Network (www.footprintnetwork.org).