Context: Environment Performance Index-2024 was released recently. The EPI highlighted that while many countries have made progress in declaring protected areas (both terrestrial and marine) abiding by the 30X30 target under the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, many of these protected areas are ‘paper parks.’ Many of the terrestrial protected areas have large parts where commercial activities such as mining, agriculture, building and construction activity are found and not natural ecosystems. The marine protected areas are affected by trawling and extensive fishing. Thus, the protected areas have failed to halt ecosystem loss, reduce environmentally destructive practices and suffer from shortages of funding and personnel, making enforcement difficult.
About Environmental Performance Index
- EPI is a data driven summary of the state of sustainability around the world. EPI offers a scorecard to help countries assess how close they are to established environmental policy targets.
- EPI ranks points to the leaders and laggards in different aspects of environmental performance and provides practical guidance for countries that aspire to move towards a sustainable future.
- EPI indicators help spot problems, set targets, track trends, understand outcomes and identify best policy practices.
- EPI helps government officials refine policy agenda, facilitates communication and maximize return on environmental investments.
- Published by: Yale Centre for Environment Law & Policy (Yale University), Centre for International Earth Science Information Network (Columbia University).
- Countries covered: 180 countries are scored.
- Methodology of EPI 2024:
- Ranks countries on their progress at (i) mitigating climate change, (ii) safeguarding ecosystem vitality and (iii) promoting environmental health. Three policy objectives for the objectives are – Ecosystem Vitality (45%), Climate Change (30%) & Environmental Health (25%) focusing on sub-components like:
- Ecosystem Vitality: Biodiversity & Habitat, Forests, Fisheries, Air Pollution, Agriculture & Water Resources.
- Climate Change: Climate change mitigation.
- Environmental Health: Air Quality, Sanitation & Drinking Water, Heavy Metal pollution and Waste Management.
- It is a composite indicator that synthesizes data on 58 sustainability indicators across 11 environmental issues into one single metric of country level performance.
- The indicators measure their growth rate or change in the last decade. Leading to challenges poor correlation between rank and absolute performance of the indicator and quality or productivity of ecosystem services has not been accounted.
Rankings in EPI 2024
- Global Rankings: Estonia, Luxembourg and Germany are the three highest ranked countries.
- India is one of the lowest rank countries in the world in EPI-2024. India has rank of 176 among 180 countries in the world. Only Myanmar, Laos, Pakistan and Vietnam are ranked below India.
- Reasons for India’s poor rankings: Restricted public access to over 95% of the protected area data submitted to the World Database on Protected Areas.