Calculating the European HPI

As with the global HPI, the European HPI regards the output of human endeavour is long and happy lives, measured by life satisfaction and life expectancy. However, the measure used for fundamental input, planetary resource consumption – the bottom half of the efficiency equation – is represented here by carbon footprint. This is a measure of the land area required to support the plant life needed to absorb and sequester CO2 emissions from fossil fuels used by a country, based on its levels of consumption.

This measure takes account of the fact that in a global economy people consume resources and ecological services from all over the world, and reallocates the carbon costs of such consumption accordingly. It also accounts for the ‘embodied’ footprint that is associated with the production of goods. For example, the carbon emitted in the manufacture of a car produced in Taiwan but bought by someone living in Slovenia will count towards Slovenia’s footprint, not Taiwan’s.

Carbon footprints include estimations of the carbon emissions involved in the production of nuclear energy. Proponents of nuclear energy tend to overlook the energy costs involved in the set-up and decommissioning of nuclear plants, the mining and refining of uranium, and in dealing with radioactive waste. In an attempt to take these costs into account, we considered a report by the Irish think-tank Feasta. It demonstrates that, at a very conservative estimate, 1 kW of electricity produced by nuclear power has approximately one-third the carbon footprint of an equivalent amount of electricity produced from gas. We therefore included one-third of the nuclear footprint to the reported carbon footprint to produce the overall resource measure used.

Carbon footprint, rather than overall ecological footprint, was used for the European HPI because of concerns that overall footprint would not have treated fairly the differences in the particular features of European countries, such as the relative abundance of forests and levels of consumption of fish rather than other food types.