India has been placed at the bottom on a list of 180 countries judged for their environmental performances by US-based institutions. Denmark topped the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) published recently by the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and the Centre for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University, followed by the UK and Finland, which earned high scores for slashing greenhouse gas emissions in recent years.
Using 40 performance indicators across 11 issue categories, the EPI ranks 180 countries on climate change performance, environmental health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national scale of how close the countries are to established environmental policy targets. “India, with increasingly dangerous air quality and rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions, falls to the bottom of rankings for the first time,” the report read.China and India are projected to be the largest and second-largest emitters of greenhouse gases in 2050, despite recently promising to curb emission growth rates, the researchers claimed.
The conclusions from the EPI analysis suggest that efficient policy results are directly associated with GDP per capita. The economic prosperity makes it possible for the nations to invest in policies and programs that help lead desirable outcomes. For the pursuit of economic prosperity manifested in industrialisation and urbanisation, trends that pose climate change strains ecosystem vitality, especially in the developing world where air and water emissions remain significant.
