Yale’s EPI 2008 and the Philippines

The July 7/14 issue of Newsweek featured Yale University’s 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI)—“a global ranking of nations with the best, and worst, environmental track records,” the magazine cover said. Curious as to how the Philippines fared, and wanting to find out the “who’s who” in the best and worst around the world, I bought a copy after briefly browsing through the contents (and initially finding out the Philippines scored somewhere between the range of 79.99 to 70, with 100 being highest).

I learned after poring over the special report, and reading further from Yale’s website, that the EPI sought to be a comprehensive yardstick of the world’s environmental issues and how each country was responding to them. Although considering the EPI as far from being entirely an accurate measure of national performance, Newsweek stated it as the “best measure we have of how nations are faring in the battle to save the environment…” The EPI provided measures for two objectives, specifically: (1) reducing environmental stresses to human health, and (2) promoting ecosystem vitality and sound natural resource management. It used 25 performance indicators which were tracked in 6 well-established policy categories such as climate change, biodiversity and habitat, water, air pollution, productive natural resources, and environmental health.

The results showed that the greenest country turned out to be Switzerland (rank #1) and the least green was Niger in Africa (rank #149). The Philippines ranked # 61 overall; in the Asia-Pacific region, #9 of 23 other countries. Surprisingly, the country scored higher (at 77.9) than the average EPI scores of countries in the Asia-Pacific region (70.8). Not bad, huh? While this looks like a reason for us to cheer at least, it shouldn’t be misinterpreted to mean that we’re doing everything right. This just means that we’re not performing as poorly on saving the environment like the 88 other countries scoring lower than us. It also means that we should work on improving on the issues where we didn’t do so well.

I’m concerned, however, that the EPI framework—while far from using arbitrary weights—placed a high weight on climate change (25%) compared to other categories, say biodiversity and habitat (7.5%). Looking at the Philippines, it scored high on the climate change category (82.0) and low on the biodiversity and habitat (44.5), although still performing better than the average score in the region on both counts. The thing is, some of the intrinsic conditions in the country may not have been sufficiently represented in the identified indicators; hence, the measure of national performance could have been overvalued in the EPI.

If we looked at the climate change category, it was measured using indicators such as emissions per capita, emission per electricity generated, and industrial carbon dioxide emissions. The Philippines would score high in these accounts. To begin with, the country is a low emitter economy due to its considerable reliance on renewables such as geothermal, wind, and solar energies for power generation. The small number of heavy industries (compared to those in developed countries) also means that we have low CO2 emissions from these sources. Hence, with a huge weight on the climate change category in the EPI, it will definitely pull up the EPI score of the Philippines. However, these three indicators, to me, may not be enough to describe our national performance pertaining to climate change. Indicators measuring adaptation interventions—to which the country is sorely falling behind—is equally important as mitigation measures; and thus, should be included to form a robust gauge of this category.

Meanwhile, on the biodiversity and habitat category, the indicators included conservation risk, effective conservation, critical habitat, and marine protected areas. These indicators included measuring the ratio of protected to non-protected lands, or how much of critical terrestrial and marine habitats were under protection, and even how much of habitats within protected areas are intact or have low human footprint. These are all good. However, the numbers don’t say everything. We may have close to 250 protected areas all over the country, but you can only count a handful that are effectively managed. Probably less than a handful even have allocated budgets for operations. Again, to me, these challenges in protected area management may not have been adequately captured in the present indicators.

The EPI, as Newsweek mentioned, is far from being devoid of gaps as it remains seriously constrained by the lack of both quality and quantity in data sources. In fact, about 90 countries were not yet included in the EPI due to lack of data. Nevertheless, it may still the best measure we have thus far, but improvements should still be done to bolster its effectiveness. It is still worthwhile, I believe, to consider the findings especially for policymaking and setting national directions and initiatives towards taking care of the environment.

(Also posted in Thinking Aloud…)