When I wrote my master thesis I was investigating different ways of measuring welfare in relation to the concept of socio-ecological resilience and the global goals. There are many measures that has been developed by organisations and scholars, all with the aim to go beyond GDP and find measures that captures what progress really means to human kind. Some of these are Human Development Index, Gross National Happiness Index, Sustainable Society Index and so on. I looked att different indicators and how well the measures took into account that sustainability has to be within the ecological limits beneficial to human society. It was clear to me that the several measures didn’t find the ecological or environmental domain as a condition rather as a component easily aggregated and exchangeable to social sustainability.
How the measure aggregate its result is essential. In many causes these measures actually include GDP as a factor and they might put a larger weight on social sustainability, such as years of living or years of schooling. That is way several of them are misleading, since those country’s can still live beyond their recourses. As for example the Scandinavian country’s. If everyone lived and consumed like Swedes do, we would need 4.2 planets, and no measurement really capturing what sustainable development really is, would suggest Sweden to be a sustainable country.
A measurement that seeks to address this problem is Sustainable Development Index. It starts with each nation’s human development score (life expectancy, education and income) and divides it by their ecological overshoot: the extent to which consumption-based CO2 emissions and material footprint exceed per-capita shares of planetary boundaries. Maximum score is 9 and no country reaches it. But maybe to your surprise, the country that performs well is 1. Cuba, 2, Costa Rica, 3 Sri Lanka and 4. Albania. Not Sweden, it’s not even in the top 20.
Maybe keeping us within the planetary boundaries and scoring high on income, years of life and schooling isn’t the most essential but my point here is that we have to start with keeping us within the ecological ceiling and in that case, Scandinavian country’s are not role models, Cuba is.