Last Straw

Costa Rica is the green­est and hap­pi­est coun­try in the world, accord­ing to a new list that ranks nations by com­bin­ing meas­ures of their eco­lo­gical foot­print with the hap­pi­ness of their cit­izens.¹

And, sur­prise sur­prise, unlike places like Bri­tain and the U.S. (which fig­ure low on the index) Costa Rica is run by left-wingers not self-serving right-wingers, it has a strong wel­fare state, it uses pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion to elect its politi­cian, not first past the post, and as opposed to send­ing its youth off to die in illegal wars for the bene­fit of a wealthy elite Costa Rica abol­ished its army back in 1948.

But you keep vot­ing for right-wing war-mongering plonkers if that makes you feel bet­ter…²

HPI report on Costa Rica:

With the highest levels of repor­ted life sat­is­fac­tion, and the highest happy life years – Costa Rica stands out in the HPI even before con­sid­er­ing its eco­lo­gical foot­print. It has the fifth-lowest human poverty index in the devel­op­ing world, and the pro­por­tion of people liv­ing on less than $2-a-day is lower than in Romania – an EU mem­ber. What makes these res­ults even more remark­able is that it achieves this with a quarter of the foot­print of the USA. This is no mat­ter of chance. Costa Rica, a haven of demo­cracy and peace in tur­bu­lent Cent­ral Amer­ica, has taken very delib­er­ate steps to reduce its envir­on­mental impact. Unique in the world for hav­ing com­bined its min­is­tries of energy and the envir­on­ment back in the 1970s, a stag­ger­ing 99 per cent of its energy comes from renew­able sources. In 1997, a car­bon tax was intro­duced on emis­sions – with the funds gained being used to pay indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies to pro­tect their sur­round­ing forests. Defor­est­a­tion has been reversed, and forests cover twice as much land as 20 years ago. In 2007, the Costa Rican Gov­ern­ment declared that it inten­ded to become car­bon neut­ral by 2021. As a res­ult of these huge steps, Costa Rica has risen up the ranks of Yale University’s Envir­on­mental Per­form­ance Indic­ator, from 15^th in the world in 2006 to 5^th in 2008, the highest pos­i­tion out­side Europe. Pro­fessor Mari­ano Rojas, a Costa Rican eco­nom­ist at the Latin Amer­ican Fac­ulty of Social Sci­ences in Mex­ico, is unsur­prised by his country’s per­form­ance and adds a few fur­ther explanations:

• The abol­i­tion of the country’s army in 1949, free­ing up gov­ern­ment money to spend on social programmes.
• Solid social net­works of friends, fam­il­ies and neigh­bour­hoods, allowed by a sens­ible work-life balance.
• Rich nat­ural capital.
• Equal treat­ment of women.
• Strong polit­ical participation.

Costa Rica is not heaven. Its wel­fare state, one of the most developed out­side Scand­inavia, must deal with an eco­nomic sys­tem that pro­duces high levels of inequal­ity, and almost 10 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion live on under $2-a-day. Clean water and adult lit­er­acy are almost uni­ver­sal, but not quite. And, whilst we wait with bated breath to see if Costa Rica really does move towards being car­bon neut­ral in forth­com­ing HPIs, its cur­rent eco­lo­gical foot­print is still eight per cent above the one-planet liv­ing threshold.

1. Ash­ley Seager report­ing for The Guard­ian [↩]
2. And, yes, Britain’s New Labour and the U.S.‘s Demo­crats are right-wing [↩]