Life Expectancy, Carbon Footprints and a Happy Planet

What’s the happiest country in the world? Not necessarily the most joyous, but the best at converting the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for its people?

A few hints: small, Spanish-speaking, isthmian, untrammeled by war for decades—in fact, constitutionally banned from having armed forces, an agricultural producer, coffee- and banana-exporting. No idea?

Costa Rica, according to the Happy Planet Index (HPI), a new metric created by the New Economics Foundation that's the first to measure the countries of the world according to a combination of their life expectancy, “life-satisfaction” and ecological footprint.

The countries that do best on the index overall might surprise you. They also offer a lesson: It's possible to achieve long, happy lives without breaking the planetary bank.

Let's start with life expectancy. The countries with the highest life expectancies will shock no one: Western Europe, Canada, Australia, the U.S., Japan and a smattering in East Asia, plus a few surprises with Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba.

The West fares slightly worse when it comes to “life-satisfaction," a numerical, subjective assessment of how a nation’s people feel about their own happiness. The U.S. comes in at 7.8, the UK at 7.4, Germany at 7.2, France at 7.1. Latin America fares better, with great swathes having a “life-satisfaction” score exceeding 7.5, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and much of Central America and the Caribbean. Costa Rica has the highest score: 8.5.

The greatest difference showed up in ecological footprints. To compare countries, the researchers measured the amount of land needed to meet all the resource requirements of a population, plus the amount of vegetated land required to absorb all of that population's CO2 emissions.

Per person, a fair share would be about 2.1 global hectares – one-planet living. Instead, the populations of most advanced, industrialized countries are using in excess of two—some as many as four—planets to satisfy their population’s consumption, the study found. That's only possible because poorer countries aren't using their fair share, the authors say, and it highlights an important truth:

"It is simply impossible for everyone on the planet to live as Westerners do today. We would indeed need three planets to do so. We still only have one."

The HPI modelers used those numbers to map world’s “happy life years” (HLY), a multiplication of the “life-satisfaction” score times the average life expectancy, against GDP per capita. GDP correlates with the “happy life years” measure, to a point; the most important gains occur within the first $17,000 of increasing GDP, after which point there’s little systemic variance. Costa Rica, with the highest “life-satisfaction” score as well as the most HLY, has a GDP of $10,000.

The results become even more striking when one looks at over-all HPI scores, calculated, very roughly speaking, by dividing HLY by the global ecological footprint, and adding several constants to normalize the distribution.

In the over-all rankings, Costa Rica comes in first with a score of 76.1. Somewhat below it are the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, then Guatemala, Vietnam, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Brazil, Honduras, and Nicaragua at 60.5 (the astute student of geography has by now noticed a pattern: nearly all of these countries are in Latin America, where renewable energy sources are stunningly abundant. Costa Rica gets over 99 percent of its energy from renewable sources).