Happy Planet Index by Country 2024

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is one of the more recent ways to evaluate the success of the world's nations. This value goes beyond looking at capitalistic metrics of the success of a country. Instead, the HPI looks at how nations use their environmental resources efficiently while ensuring the longevity of citizens.

Factors of the Happy Planet Index

Despite its name, the Happy Planet Index does not factor emotional happiness into its calculation. It uses well-being, life expectancy, and ecological footprint to calculate the HPI. Higher HPI values indicate that a country effectively uses the environmental resources they have without undue stress on the planet while ensuring that citizens have long, satisfying lives.

The well-being value comes from reports of citizens on their life satisfaction using a scale from one to ten. Higher scores relate to people who feel happier about living in their home countries.

Life expectancy indicates how long the citizens of a country live. Countries that have citizens with longer lives likely provide them with adequate health care, nutrition, and resources to reach advanced age.

Ecological footprint examines the amount of land required to provide the resources needed to meet a nation's consumption. High ecological footprints mean that those countries overuse their natural resources to meet demand. Those nations may need to turn to other countries to get the natural resources they need. Requiring resources beyond a nation's boundaries shows an inefficient use of the land and potential damage to the planet.

The HPI shows that countries do not need to overconsume, damage the environments of other countries to gain resources or harm the local environment to protect the livelihoods of the people that live in them.

Countries with the Best and Worst Happy Planet Indices

The most recent data for the Happy Planet Index comes from 2019. In that year, the country with the greatest HPI was Costa Rica, with an HPI of 62.10. That country's life expectancy was 80.30. Its ecological footprint was 2.65, and the well-being value was 7.00. While other countries had lower ecological footprints, greater life expectancies, and greater well-being values, they did not have HPI scores higher than Costa Rica's.

India had the lowest HPI globally. Its calculated value was 36.40, which came from a lower well-being score of 3.25, despite the nation's good ecological footprint (1.22) and life expectancy (69.70).