The sustainable development index: Measuring the ecological efficiency of human development in the anthropocene

By Jason Hickel Goldsmiths. Ecological Economics, 2020

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When the Human Development Index (HDI) was introduced in the 1990s, it was an important step toward a more sensible measure of progress, one defined less by GDP growth and more by social goals. But the limitations of HDI have become clear in the 21st century, given a growing crisis of climate change and ecological breakdown. HDI pays no attention to ecology, and retains an emphasis on high levels of income that – given strong correlations between income and environmental impact – violates sustainability principles. The countries that score highest on the HDI also contribute most, in per capita terms, to climate change and other forms of ecological breakdown. In this sense, HDI promotes a model of development that is empirically incompatible with ecological stability, and impossible to universalize. In this paper I propose an alternative index that corrects for these problems: the Sustainable Development Index (SDI). The SDI retains the elegant and intuitive formula of the HDI but places a sufficiency threshold on per capita income, and incorporates two key indicators of ecological impact: CO2 emissions and material footprint, both calculated in per capita consumption-based terms. Using this method, the SDI measures nations' ecological efficiency in delivering human development.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54db6025c2f9cf7cc5c598fb14a161db92a1b514

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In Environmental Engineering

  1. Robert Salomone

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