2014 ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE INDEX
Introduction OUR METHOD Since the landmark Rio Earth Summit launched the sustainable development movement in 1992, the international community has focused significant attention on critical environmental issues, having seen real progress on some issues, but failure on others. Two decades later, the world is poised to scale up efforts to protect the global environment by identifying a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This opportunity comes at a time when there is an unprecedented level of evidence demonstrating that when management and measurement goals align, the international community can achieve progress on environment and human health objectives. Conversely, when they misalign—as is too often the case—progress is stalled and environmental conditions decline.
areas comprised of 20 indicators (see Methods). Indicators in the EPI measure how close countries are to meeting internationally established targets or, in the absence of agreed-upon targets, how they compare relative to the best performing countries. The EPI gives decisionmakers access to important environmental data organized in a way that is easy to understand and relevant to policy, intending to drive productive competition. It allows countries to compare their performance to neighbors and peers, and, through the analysis of time series data, see how their own performance has changed over time. Demand for robust, authoritative indicators of environmental performance is at an all-time high. This demand is driven by:
• a widespread recognition of
The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) — a global ranking of countries’ environmental results — is a key contributor to the world’s increasing ability to assess global environmental movement toward its environmental policy goals. The 2014 EPI, introduced in this report and in further in detail at www.epi.yale. edu, highlights the value of using robust indicators to track environmental performance at national and global levels.
What is the EPI?
The EPI ranks how well countries perform on high-priority environmental issues in two broad policy areas: protection of human health from environmental harm and protection of ecosystems. Within these two policy objectives the EPI scores country performance in nine issue
13 2014 EPI
the benefits of data-driven decisionmaking;
• ongoing pressure on governments
to invest limited resources as wisely as possible;
• growing concern over the dangers posed by poorly managed environmental risks;
• widespread commitment to making sustainability a central operating principle of the post-2015 international development agenda; and
• rapid diffusion of sustainability
strategies in the corporate sector.