How the European HPI is calculated
The European HPI is an efficiency measure. It shows how much well-being (in ‘happy life years’) a country obtains from the amount of carbon that can be sequestered by one global hectare of land.
The concept of the HPI is straight forward, but the actual calculation is more complex. Two constant terms are used. One, added to the footprint, ensures the coefficients of variance of the top and bottom halves of the equation roughly match. This ensures that variation in HPI is not driven by the much greater variation in carbon footprint, at the expense of the more subtle, but equally important, variations in happy life years. The second constant, a multiplier, scales up the final figure so that a country living within its global fair share, with a life satisfaction score of 10/10 and a life expectancy of 85, achieves an HPI score of 100.
Conceptually, it is straight forward and intuitive:
| HPI = | Life satisfaction x Life expectancy
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x ß |
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Carbon Footprint + α |
(For details of how alpha and beta are calculated, see the appendix in the full Happy Planet Index report)
Adopting a similar standard for a reasonable ideal as in the global HPI gives us a target of 80.7. As the results from the 2007 European Happy Planet Index show, no European nation has been able to achieve such in the 2007 European Happy Planet Index – even Iceland, the top scoring nation in 2007 only achieves 72.3.