Reordering the ranking

Lists can often be found in the media ranking the richest and poorest countries on the planet, the nations with the greatest economic growth or the lowest rates of corruption and so on. The names at the top of these lists are usually the same countries, perhaps with slight variations in the order. The same can be said at the bottom of the list.
With this in mind, it is refreshing to discover that there are other ways of classifying the levels of development and happiness of a country’s inhabitants, and the results of such rankings can throw up a few surprises. Every year since 2006, the London-based think tank the New Economics Foundation has published the Happy Planet Index which measures each country’s development based on life expectancy, the subjective perception of happiness and the nation’s ecological footprint. According to this ranking, the ten countries where the inhabitants have the longest, happiest and most sustainable life are as follows:
Costa Rica
Vietnam
Colombia
Belize
El Salvador
Jamaica
Panama
Nicaragua
Venezuela
Guatemala
The highest ranking European country does appear until number 18... and it is Albania. The United States of America, which often tops the chart in such rankings, has to settle for position 105 out of 151.

Sources:

1. The New Economics Foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economics_Foundation
2. The Happy Planet Index: http://www.happyplanetindex.org

    
    
    
   

A sinking country

Tuvalu is a tiny country in Polynesia (covering just a quarter of the area of Barcelona) made up of nine coral atolls. Not many people have heard of it, although it did make the news a few years ago when it allowed various television companies to use its internet domain (.tv) in return for sums of money that far exceeded the country’s GDP.

The golden toad of Costa Rica has the dubious honour of being the first known case of extinction resulting directly from current climate change. Tuvalu may soon go down in history for being the first country to disappear for the same reason. With the country’s highest point at just five metres, the rising sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps will soon swallow the group of islands up. It is not just Tuvalu that is under threat: Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Tokelau and the Maldives are all facing the same watery demise. Around half a million islanders will have to abandon their homelands and become the world’s first climate refugees. Within a few years, the waves will claim the beaches, drown the vegetable patches and engulf the coconut trees with saltwater. Experts believe that it is too late to do anything to save these countries from their fate, but there is still hope for the rest of the world... as long as we take action right away.

Sources:

1. Tuvalu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu
2. What is an atoll: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll
3. The golden toad of Costa Rica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_toad
4. Data on the effects of climate change on the atolls of Polynesia are taken from Mark Lynas’s book “Six degrees: Our future on a hotter planet”: http://www.marklynas.org/books/