Components of the HPI
The measures which comprise the global HPI are explained here. They are:
Life satisfaction and life expectancy
How can we measure well-being in terms of happy and healthy lives? The health aspect is (relatively) straightforward – the best-known headline indicator being life expectancy at birth (we have used life expectancy data from the 2007/08 Human Development Index report which provides figures for 2005). The ‘happy’ part has been debated since the time of Aristotle.
In recent years, the debate has moved from philosophy to the realm of science, with a growing body of research identifying what it means to be happy, what drives it and how to measure it. For us, being ‘happy’ is more than just having a smile on your face – we use the term subjective well-being to capture its complexity. Aside from feeling ‘good’, it also incorporates a sense of individual vitality, opportunities to undertake meaningful, engaging activities which confer feelings of competence and autonomy, and the possession of a stock of inner resources that helps one cope when things go wrong. Well-being is also about feelings of relatedness to other people – both in terms of close relationships with friends and family, and belonging to a wider community.
Encapsulating all of these aspects of well-being precisely requires detailed measurement, and nef has called for governments to collect thorough and regular National Accounts of Well-being to do so. However, extensive data has already been collected in surveys worldwide and over the last forty-five years on one fundamental aspect of well-being – life satisfaction.
Life satisfaction is typically measured with the following question:
All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?
The life satisfaction data we have used for HPI 2.0 derive from the life satisfaction question in the 2005 Gallup World Poll, and also from the World Values Survey.
Responses are made on numerical scales, typically from 0 to 10, where 0 is dissatisfied and 10 is satisfied. Years of research have demonstrated that, despite its apparent simplicity, the question produces meaningful results. Individuals’ responses correlate with the size and strength of their social networks, relationship status, level of education, presence of disability, as well as with their material conditions, such as income and employment. The averages for countries tend to be higher where people within that country enjoy higher levels of social capital, better climate, richer natural resources, higher life expectancy, better standards of living, and more voice within government.
Furthermore, responses to this question correlate well with other attempts to assess well-being. People who say they are satisfied with their life tend also to make other positive assessments, such as reporting more frequent good moods, are described by their loved ones as being satisfied, are observed to smile more often, and are less likely to commit suicide later on in life. Importantly, reported life satisfaction also correlates with all the complex aspects of well-being described earlier, such as feeling autonomous and being resilient.
In 2008, two years after the HPI was launched, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), built subjective well-being measures including life satisfaction into its set of sustainable development indicators providing official acknowledgement that they may be useful in assessing progress towards human goals.
Ecological footprint
Measures of life satisfaction and life expectancy focus on what we want societies to enable us to achieve – their human goals. But this does not address the means with which they do this, or of the inputs required. Yet consideration of these issues is essential, given that how we ensure our well-being now will affect whether others around the world can also secure their own well-being, and whether any of us can do so in the future. This is the ‘sustainable’ aspect of sustainable well-being. No moral framework would accept high well-being if it was at the expense of others living today and/or future generations. Such considerations are particularly relevant where limited resources are required to support well-being. And the most finite limited resources that we currently rely on are natural ones
But in a complex world, it is not a simple matter to measure our impact on the planet. How can one compare the impact of using a gallon of oil with a gallon of water, or a tonne of potatoes with a tonne of potassium? The best available approach is currently the ecological footprint, developed by ecologists Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, and championed by a range of organisations including the Global Footprint Network and WWF. The EU statistical agency Eurostat is considering incorporating the ecological footprint into its sustainable development indicator set, whilst the Welsh Assembly Government has already adopted it as one of five headline indicators of sustainability.
The ecological footprint of an individual is a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all their resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to sequester (absorb) all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume. This figure is expressed in units of ‘global hectares’. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to estimate the total amount of productive hectares available on the planet. Dividing this by the world’s total population, we can calculate a global per capita figure on the basis that everyone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources. Using the latest footprint methodology, resulting in the data in the Global Footprint Network’s Ecological Footprint Atlas, the figure is 2.1 global hectares. This implies that a person using up to 2.1 global hectares is, in these terms at least, using their fair share of the world’s resources – one-planet living.
In 2005, the per capita footprint for the rich OECD nations was 6.0 global hectares. The implication: we are living as if we had almost three planets’ worth of resources.
Such large footprints are in part possible by relying on poorer countries to provide us with raw materials – they represent the ecological debt owed by rich countries to poor ones. This raises the stark reality that it is pointless for poorer countries to aspire to becoming ‘more like the West’ – 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.
For this reason, the ecological footprint is also useful for understanding social justice. Improving living standards in poorer countries can only be achieved in parallel with declining resource consumption in richer ones.
The average per capita footprint worldwide also highlights a serious problem. At 2.3 global hectares it is just above the world’s sustainable capacity, and has been since the mid-1980s. This ecological overshoot in part represents the unsustainable emission of CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the planet can re-absorb it.
