Keeping tabs on the best indicators for quality of life among 12 advanced democracies

The World Wildlife Fund has created an appropriate and telling index by combining and comparing the results from The Human Development Report and Living Planet‘s Ecological Footprint scores. The WWF mandated a minimum score of 0.8 on the Human Development Index in order to determine whether the country’s score is providing a certain degree of quality of life at the present time. In order to ensure that the country is doing this in a sustainable manner (reserving resources and proving good stewardship for the future), the WWF requires an Ecological Footprint from the Living Planet Report of less than 1.8 hectares. By combining measures for which today’s quality of life and tomorrows sustainability are accounted, the WWF has discovered a critical and well-balanced indicator by which governments–as well as the think tanks that influence them–might critique their direction. While Cuba, Colombia, and Ecuador come close to reaching the sustainability box (falling just short of the Ecological Footprint mark), Peru is the only country currently who meets both criteria. All 12 nations reviewed on internationalcomparisons.org miss the sustainability box’s mark due to poor Ecological Footprint scores, the closest of which is Japan which still scores a distant 4.3 hectares.