Environmental Performance Index

The 2024 EPI results are ready! Estonia leads the world in overall environmental performance with a 40% reduction of greenhouse emissions over the last decade, good air quality, and vibrant ecosystems. Growing economies in Southern and Southeast Asia, such as Viet Nam, Pakistan, and Laos, must redouble efforts to reduce their reliance on coal, which would bring massive benefits for climate change mitigation, air quality, and ecosystem vitality. You can find the 2024 EPI report and explore the results on our website: https://epi.yale.edu/

Next Monday, June 3, the Environmental Performance Index will release the results of its 2024 report! Register for our webinar and be the first to learn how 180 countries rank on mitigating climate change, promoting environmental health, and safeguarding ecosystem vitality. We will have guest speakers from the country that achieved the highest overall score, and from the one that made the most progress over the last decade.

We are #hiring a postdoctoral associate to lead the 2026 EPI cycle! Know anyone who might be interested?

Happy World Toilet Day!

Recycling is essential to create a circular economy, as it helps reduce pollution associated with other waste treatment methods and mitigates the impacts of resource extraction. For example, recycling critical minerals in electronic waste lowers mining requirements of the energy transition. However, recycling is not a cure-all: as nations negotiate a Global Plastics Treaty this week in Nairobi, we must keep in mind that recycling also has associated environmental impacts, and not all plastic can be recycled. A recent study by Marvin Bachmann and colleagues showed that to stay within planetary boundaries is not enough to enhance plastic recycling: the world must limit plastic production as well. South Korea received the highest score in the 2022 EPI Recycling indicator, with an estimated 67% of recyclable materials recycled. For the 2024 EPI, we plan to broaden the scope of our Recycling indicator to account for other waste management practices that contribute to a circular economy, such as composting and anaerobic digestion.

The 2024 EPI will incorporate the #30x30 target in its biodiversity indicators based on protected area coverage, while also emphasizing the importance of protected area quality over quantity. Among other things, protected area quality means representativeness, connectedness, and effectiveness.

Scientists in Brazil have recently rediscovered the Pernambuco holly: a small tree species thought to have been extinct for almost 200 years. After a 6-day mission in the city of Igarassu, the Pernambuco holly was rediscovered by Re:wild, a conservation group that plans to repopulate the area through a new breeding program. Other holly trees, such as the American holly (𝐼𝑙𝑒𝑥 𝑜𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑎), can help restore forests damaged by ocean spray, provide shelter for insects, and are incredibly wind resistant. The Pernambuco holly is just one of 2,200 missing species from across 160 countries, compiled in a list by the IUCN, a data partner of the EPI.

Happy World Vegan Day! A plant-based diet can benefit both your health and the environment! Reducing our consumption of animal products is linked to reduced climate-heating emissions, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Not all animal products are the same: cows and other ruminants are a major source of methane emissions and require more feed than other farm animals. Thus, it's not necessary to be strictly vegan to have a big impact. As Katerina S. Stylianou and colleagues showed in their 2021 study, replacing only 10% of daily calories from beef and processed meat with fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and certain seafood can lengthen our life expectancy by 48 min per day and cut our dietary carbon footprint by 33%! This is an issue in which both individuals and governments have power and responsibility. Denmark, the top-ranked country in the 2022 EPI, has recently established a national plant-based roadmap and plans to slowly transition its food system towards sustainability.

Around a quarter of Earth’s forests have developed without significant human disturbance over the course of centuries to millenia. Found primarily in Brazil, Canada and Russia, “primary forests” play a disproportionate role in sequestering and storing carbon thanks to their large trees, and provide a habitat to countless species. Harnessing novel datasets from the Global Forest Watch, the 2024 EPI will put special weight on countries’ efforts at protecting primary forests as part of a revamped Tree Cover Loss indicator. Image: Russian pine forest in Leningrad Oblast (Raita Futo)

African Parks, an international NGO, recently purchased 2,000 white rhinos in auction from the world’s largest privately-owned collection in South Africa. Rhinos are at extreme risk of being poached for their horns via the illegal wildlife trade. Over the next 10 years, African Parks plans to phase out active breeding and rewild the rhinos in various conservation areas across Africa, though the exact countries are unspecified. Of all 12 countries in which African Parks operates, the Republic of Congo scores highest (86.4/100) in the Species Protection Index, and is home to the Odzala-Kokoua National Park. With the world’s largest rhino population, South Africa scored 95.1/100 in the 2022 EPI's Species Habitat Index, but faces growing habitat loss due to expanding croplands, human settlements, forest plantations, and mining.