Climate Crisis Weekly: What's your country's environment score?

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The 2020 Environmental Performance Index is out — who’s No. 1?
Here’s a roundup of great reads to learn more about links between racism and the environment.
Germany, the largest emitter in Europe, submits its climate plan to the EU.
And more…

Yale and Columbia’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2020 (https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2020/component/epi) is out — how does your country rank?

Overall EPI rankings indicate which countries are best addressing the environmental challenges that every nation faces.

The EPI “provides a quantitative basis for comparing, analyzing, and understanding environmental performance for 180 countries.” The interactive page has pull-down menus for both countries and categories, and you can crunch the data in many different ways. So let’s just take a quick look at two of the most environmentally impactful countries on the planet.

The US ranks 24th in the world on environmental performance overall. (Denmark was first, and Liberia was last, at 180th, if you’re curious.) China, in comparison, ranks 120th, and while that sounds dire, it’s actually improved in the last decade. (India, another major player, is 168th.)

On climate change, the US ranked 15th. China ranks 103rd. The Guardian asserts:

[The US] is currently the second-biggest contributor to the climate crisis, after China. Over time, it has put more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere than any other nation. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/04/us-ranks-24th-in-the-world-on-environmental-performance)

Zach Wendling, lead researcher on the research, explains why that’s so:

If you look at Denmark, they’re doing great but they’re a tiny fraction of overall carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions broadly. The US is one of the top five players in every greenhouse gas, so we need to do better than just OK if we’re going to generate the best practices.

Click on the link above to compare countries and categories — it’s a great resource. And the executive summary can be found here. https://epi.yale.edu/downloads/epipolicymakersummaryr9.pdf


Much more (Includes videos): https://electrek.co/2020/06/13/climate-crisis-weekly-country-environmental-index-germany-climate-plan/