Living Green: About the Methodology (page 2 of 2)

Methodology for Countries Rankings

To build our green and livable index, we collected data from the United Nations 2006 Human Development Indicators (HDI) and the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). The HDI examines national quality of life and doesn’t merely focus on per-capita income. It takes into account information on life expectancy, educational attainment and national per capita income. The ESI index is based on a collaboration between Yale University and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the World Economic Forum. It tracks a diverse set of indicators that influence environmental sustainability at the national level. For 141 nations, the database offers information on 76 different variables organized into 21 sustainability categories. We included information on 13 of these 21 categories in our index. Six of the thirteen categories have a direct effect on a nation’s daily environmental quality of life, such as air and water quality. The remaining seven categories are key indicators of whether a nation is a good regional and global “citizen” in not exacerbating environmental challenges. Such a nation does not contribute to regional problems such as acid rain, and on the important issue of climate change, has a small ecological footprint and produces relatively few greenhouse gases. A good global citizen also protects biodiversity located within its physical borders. To construct a national ranking based on a nation’s HDI score and on its scores on each of these thirteen categories, we first take all fourteen scores and standardize them. This transforms the data into comparable units. We chose to give the HDI index a weight of 50%, and the subset of ESI variables received a weight of 50%. We weighed each ESI variable equally so each of the thirteen indicators receives a weight of (1/26). Sorting this overall score provides our ranking.

Standardization Formula Used:
Define Xi = nation i's score on variable X
Define Xbar = the sample average for variable X
Define sdX = the sample standard deviation for variable X
Nation i's standardized score = (Xi - Xbar)/sdX

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• Living Green
• Ranking the best (and worst) countries.
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• Living Green: Full Country and City Rankings
• We analyzed data from two top sources covering 141 nations to rank the world's greenest, most livable places. View the complete city and country rankings.
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• Blog: Matthew Kahn PhD -- Environmental and Urban Economics
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• More Environmental Sustainability Index Data
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