Higher consumption fails to improve well being, says Happy Planet Index

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) says it has found that higher levels of consumption are not translating into higher levels of well-being. The index is an attempt to go beyond GDP and find a way to measure how countries are providing citizens with a good sense of well-being without placing an excessive burden on the planet.

The HPI, compiled by the Berlin-based Hot or Cool Institute, a public interest think tank, calculates life expectancy, an objective indicator, combined with the more subjective, self-reported well-being, and then divides this by a carbon footprint, which it takes as a proxy for consumption.

Previous editions of the study looked at the ecological footprint, which took into account wider environmental considerations, such as land use associated with agriculture and forestry. 

The sustainable well-being lead on the HPI, Dr Saamah Abdallah, said in a press release: “HPI should not replace existing metrics, but instead encourage countries to democratically adopt alternative measures of progress.”

The latest report found that Western Europe has surpassed Latin America as the highest scoring region, with Croatia and Lithuania among the countries who saw the greatest improvement. The infographic below looks at the situation in the EU27.

The Hot or Cool Institute has for the first time looked at HPI scores across income brackets within selected countries.

They wrote that their findings strongly confirm that within most countries, the wealthiest citizens score the worst on the HPI.

They gave the example of the United States, where the richest 10% have an average carbon footprint of nearly 70 tonnes per capita – nearly four times the average of the rest of the population – and have only marginally better well-being outcomes. 

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Eurostat, the EU’s official statistical agency, among others, are already using indicators that look into well being. These combine more objective indicators, such as income and health indices, with more subjective indicators, such as how an individual perceives their well being.

Eurostat has been collecting a number of “quality of life” indicators (EU-SILC – statistics on income and living conditions) for many years, following the European Commission communication on “GDP and Beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world” in 2012. The OECD also has a Better Life Index. 

The report by the Hot or Cool Institute is based on figures from 2021. The HPI was originally compiled by the UK-based, New Economics Foundation.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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