Environmental Performance Index greenwashes the rich

An “Environmental Performance Index” to be launched on May 9 at the UN claims to align itself with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but actually hides the impact of unsustainable consumption and production patterns in the North as well as the contributions of the Global South to achieving the internationally agreed targets.

The EPI (available here), now in its 10th edition, is authored by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (Davos). This year’s report claims to have a “parallel approach” to the internationally agreed SDGs in its “use of quantitative metrics to evaluate policy performance” and maintains that “aligning EPI’s indicators with the SDGs provides a baseline for evaluating national performance and shows how far countries are from reaching global targets”.

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