The Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series

Prof. Daniel Esty December 7, 2001

On Friday, December 7, 2001, the Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series hosted Professor Daniel Esty for his presentation entitled "Counting the Environment: The Environmental Sustainability Index and the Shift Toward More Data-Driven Environmentalism". Daniel Esty is Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. The following is a précis of Professor Esty's talk.

In this era of tremendous planetary change, the need to institute sustainable practices on a global scale is paramount. To do this, it has become important to develop solid data methodologies to properly measure various sectors of environmental information and more broadly to shift environmental decision-making onto firmer analytic foundations.

The need to chart the progress of sustainability is inevitable. If steps are not taken to track what has been accomplished to date, no benchmark will exist for nations to assess their own progress and for countries to compare themselves against one another. The ESI makes it possible to gauge environmental performance and will allow lagging nations to identify where and how they can improve their pollution control and natural resource management efforts.

The World Economic Forum (Davos Forum), in cooperation with the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), and the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) have formulated a data-driven tool to index the relative sustainability of different nations. The 2002 Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) is a list of 67 underlying variables formulated into 20 different core indicators, in 5 key components of sustainability. These 5 core components are:

• Environmental Systems
• Stresses
• Human Vulnerability
• Social and Institutional Capacity
• Global Stewardship

All of the above information is then aggregated to give an overall picture of environmental sustainability for 122 different nations. Finland and Haiti were at first and last place respectively in the previous index of nations released in 2001. The ESI attempts to accurately portray the level of sustainability in each nation, and allows for individual nations to see in what areas they are weak and in what areas they are strong. It also gives an aggregate benchmark to compare the level of improvement in a given year, and to track the trends of individual nations. The most recent ESI report can be downloaded from our Web site at: http://www.yale.edu/envirocenter/

The environmental sector is ridden with incomplete information, poor data and weak statistical methods. Too many policy efforts at the global, national, regional , provincial, community and corporate scales lack firm underpinnings. Too often critical choices are made based on rhetoric or emotion. The shift to a more data-driven environmental ethic could provide a greatly needed boost to the reliability of environmental information and provide for an improved backing for the environment among the public and in the political sector.

It is quite evident that the current state of environmental data is very poor in comparison to economic and demographic information, and if tools like the ESI are embraced and a shift in the current environmental information paradigm were to take place, a policy rebirth could be felt in the environmental sector. The ESI represents a first step toward a new approach to pollution control and natural resource management where decision-making will be substantiated by data, facts and analytic rigor rather than emotion and rhetoric.

Biography

Dan Esty holds faculty appointments at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He came to Yale in 1994 after eight years in Washington during which time he served as Special Assistant to EPA Administrator William Reilly, EPA's Deputy Chief of Staff, and EPA's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Evaluation. He is author or editor of six books including "Environmental Performance Measurement: The Global Report 2001 - 2002"; "Greening the GATT: Trade, Environment, and the Future"; "Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy"; "Sustaining the Asia Pacific Miracle: Environmental Protection and Economic Integration"; and "Regulatory Competition and Economic Integration", as well as numerous articles on trade, environmental protection, competitiveness, security, and development issues.

Professor Esty was an undergraduate at Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and completed his law degree at Yale.

List of articles and reports by Dr. Daniel Esty

1. Chertow, M.R. & Esty, D.C. Environmental policy : the next generation. Issues in Science and Technology (1997) 14 (1) : 73-80.
   
   
2. Esty, D.C. Beyond Rio: trade and the environment. Environmental Law (1993) 23 (2) : 387-396.
   
   
3. Esty, D.C. Turning the giant's head. Ecodecision (1993) 10 (Sept.) : 90-91.
   
   
4. Esty, D.C. Greening the GATT : trade, environment, and the future. -- Washington, D.C. : Institute for International Economics, 1994. -- 319 p.
   
   
5. Esty, D.C. Private sector foreign investment and the environment. Review of European Community & International Environmental Law (1995) 4 (2) : 99-105.
   
   
6. Esty, D.C. & Geradin, D. Market access, competitiveness, and harmonization : environmental protection in regional trade agreements. Harvard Environmental Law Review (1997) 21 (2) : 265-336.
   
   
7. Esty, D.C Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy (ed. with Marian Chertow), New Haven: Yale University Press (1997).
   
   
8. Esty, D.C. Professor Daniel C. Esty's Publications. New Haven, CT : Yale Law School, Yale University, 2000.
   
   
9. Esty, D.C. Regulatory Competition and Economic Integration: Comparative Perspectives (ed. with Damien Geradin), Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001).
   
   
10. Esty, D.C. Environmental Performance Measurement: the Global Report 2001-2002 (ed. with Peter K. Cornelius), Oxford: Oxford University Press (2002).
    
    
11. Lallas, P.L., Esty, D.C. & Hoogstraten, D.J.van. Environmental protection and international trade : toward mutually supportive rules and policies. Harvard Environmental Law Review (1992) 16 (2) : 271-342.