Everything you need to know about the Happy Planet Index

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) combines three metrics to show how efficient different countries are at using environmental resources to enable their residents to lead long, happy lives.

1. Wellbeing: How satisfied the residents of each country say they feel with life overall, on a scale from zero to ten, based on data collected as part of the Gallup World Poll.
2. Life expectancy: The average number of years a person is expected to live in each country, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
3. Carbon Footprint: Carbon footprint: estimate of the per capita greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption and economic activity within a country. We have used the data from the World Inequality Database, which in turn is based on the Global Carbon Atlas, and supplemented by data from the EORA Global Supply Chain Database.The final data includes greenhouse gases produced directly within a country, for example for heating, electricity production or transport. But it also includes the greenhouse gases emitted in the production of goods and services consumed within that country, regardless of where they were produced. It includes emissions associated with individual consumption, but also emissions associated with the activities of government and business investment.

We use a traffic light system – red, amber, and green – to show how well countries score on each element. Before combining the three metrics, we make adjustments to ensure that no single component dominates the overall calculations. Details can be found in the methodology report.

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live. Nor does it indicate the most developed country in the traditional sense, or the most environmentally friendly. Instead, the HPI combines these ideas, offering a method of comparing countries’ progress towards the goal of providing long-term wellbeing for all, without exceeding the limits of the planet’s resources.

The HPI inevitably does not answer every question.

• There is more to health than just life expectancy.
• There is more to a country’s environmental impact than its carbon footprint – the footprint does not include use of other resources, other forms of pollution or impacts to biodiversity.
• And there is more to an individual’s wellbeing than their response to a single question on whether they are satisfied with their life – some parts of their life may be going well, others less so.
• Lastly, there is more to a nation’s health, wellbeing, and environmental impact than its average > life expectancy, average life satisfaction, and average ecological footprint – alongside averages, one also needs to look at distributions.

As we acknowledge in the Charter for People’s Measures of Societal Success > , whilst research shows that health and happiness are indeed the most important outcomes globally, citizens have not been directly consulted in choosing what to measure in the HPI.

What the HPI does do is to serve as a compass pointing in the overall direction in which societies should be travelling – towards higher wellbeing lifestyles with lower carbon footprints. It attempts to do this in as simple a way as possible, without being simplistic.

To measure wellbeing, we use data from a globally renowned survey, the Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents questions about how they feel their lives are going overall. The question we use, known as the ‘Cantril Self Anchoring Scale’ or the ‘Ladder of Life’, has been used in surveys since the 1960s, and its validity has been demonstrated in a range of different contexts around the world.

Importantly, asking a single broad question allows the people completing the survey to assess the issues according to their own criteria, to weigh each one as they choose, and to produce an overall response.

There is a growing evidence-base showing that subjective measures of wellbeing, like ‘the Ladder of Life’ correlate with more objective measures such as measurement of stress hormones and brain scans. Subjective wellbeing has been found to accurately predict a range of outcomes – from how long someone will stay in a job or stay married, to how long they live, to the results of elections.

As a result, psychologists, sociologists, and economists now regularly use subjective wellbeing data in research, and policy makers are beginning to use it to inform decision-making. For example, in 2021, the UK Treasury added guidance to its authoritative ‘Green Book’ on using subjective wellbeing in appraisal process, whilst Mexico’s National Development Plan has been informed by evidence on predictors of subjective wellbeing. For more on how subjective wellbeing is being measured and used around the world, you can read the OECD’s 2023 stocktaking report.

Many countries may do well on the Happy Planet Index rankings despite their political systems, rather than because of them.

Governments are, of course, partly responsible for a country’s HPI score. Governments can introduce policy to reduce emissions, improve healthcare to increase life expectancy, or tackle economic inequalities to improve average well=being.But a country’s HPI score is not entirely determined by the actions of its present government.

Changes in wellbeing and life expectancy can take years to evolve. Investments in education take decades to bear fruit, particularly as the HPI does not use self-reported wellbeing data from children. Even past governments cannot be held wholly responsible for a country’s HPI score. Cultural factors and social capital have evolved over centuries and these too, strongly shape the country’s outcomes. Lastly, of course, one cannot ignore basic geographical and climate factors. To achieve a low carbon footprint is often harder in countries which face extreme hot or cold temperatures, than in those that have more temperate climates.

All these factors mean that we should not be too surprised when there are countries that do well on the HPI, despite having undemocratic or corrupt governments.

In the 2016 edition of the Happy Planet Index, life expectancy and wellbeing were adjusted for inequality. This meant two countries which had the same average life expectancy or wellbeing would score differently on the HPI if they had different levels of inequality.

To be able to make this adjustment, we used full life tables which allowed us to determine the inequality of life expectancy within a country, and the distributional data on wellbeing. The latter was not available for us for all years at the time of preparing the current version of the HPI, so we were unable to adjust HPI scores for inequality.

Having said that, evidence suggests that income inequality (which is perhaps the inequality that most people are concerned about), is associated with both average wellbeing and life expectancy. In other words, all else being equal, countries with higher income inequality will have lower average wellbeing and lower average life expectancy. As such, even without explicitly adjusting for inequality, the HPI can be seen to at least indirectly capture this factor.

We have also explored how HPI varies between income groups and found that the richest in most countries have the lowest HPI scores, because their huge carbon footprints only lead to marginal wellbeing gains compared to people with middle incomes. This highlights the wastefulness of inequality in terms of converting environmental resources into healthy happy lives.

The 2024 Happy Planet Index is the sixth edition of the index and this year, we have included time trends starting from 2006. However, the earlier published editions (2006, 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2019) all used slightly different methodologies and data sources, so they are not directly comparable over time.

The main difference between this edition and the 2021 edition is that we have used the carbon footprint instead of ecological footprint. The ecological footprint has the advantage of including more than just carbon emissions, for example also considering land use associated with agriculture and forestry. However, given some concerns about the data from a few countries, we have chosen to use the simpler carbon footprint instead. More on this decision can be found in the methodology.

There is often migration out of countries with higher Happy Planet Index scores to those with lower scores, like in Mexico to the USA (43.3 vs. 32.1).

Does this suggest that the Happy Planet index is ‘incorrect’? Definitely not. Unlike other indices, such as the Quality of Life Index or World Happiness Report, the Happy Planet Index does not rank countries in terms of quality of life or happiness.

The HPI is a measure of the sustainability of a country’s wellbeing, not a measure simply of its wellbeing. It ranks countries by how efficiently people use our limited ecological resources to live long, happy lives. We look at how countries use minimal ‘inputs’ of natural resources to create the maximum possible  ‘outputs’ of long, happy lives – thus delivering truly “sustainable wellbeing”.

The Happy Planet Index does not consider societies that deliver “good lives” which use more resources than the earth can support, to be truly successful.  At the same time however, it does not consider societies that have a per capita carbon footprint that is within the Earth’s limits, but which have very low levels of wellbeing or life expectancy to be efficient.

So while it is true that countries that typically see higher immigration generally have higher life expectancy and wellbeing than in the countries from which people migrate, they often do so at a very high cost to the Earth.

While some countries are more efficient than others at delivering long, happy lives for their people, every country has its problems and no country performs as well as it could. A good score on the HPI does not suggest that there are no problems in a country, that distribution of wellbeing or resource consumption is equitable, or that current levels of consumption are sustainable.

Human rights abuses

Human rights abuses are a problem in most of the world, including in many of the high-ranking countries in the Happy Planet Index results. While the HPI may reflect some of the negative impacts of human rights abuses and inequality, it does not seek to directly measure this. The wellbeing and life expectancy data used to calculate The Happy Planet Index scores for each country capture an overall sense of how people are doing in a nation. Although the infringement of human rights negatively impacts on the wellbeing and life expectancy of some people in a country, the Happy Planet Index is based on average figures for the population as a whole. As it is likely that people directly affected by extreme human rights abuses represent a minority, the population average wellbeing score may not fully reflect this harm.

More information about human rights abuses around the world can be found on the Amnesty International website.

Inequality

People across the world are experiencing the impact of growing inequalities – both in terms of its fundamental injustice and the shrinking opportunities and diminishing outcomes that result. The Happy Planet Index scores for each country capture an overall sense of how people are doing in a nation based on average figures for the population as a whole. Of course, averages can hide stark inequalities, and most people would see it better for a country to have, for example an equally distributed high life expectancy, than a very unequal distribution of life expectancy even if the average is high.

Having said that, the outcome measures we use – i.e. average life expectancy and average subjective wellbeing, are known to be negatively influenced by large income inequalities. So it is likely that, all else being equal, countries where economic inequality goes down will see improvements in the HPI, and vice versa.

We rely on the availability of robust data from the United Nations,Gallup World Poll, and the Global Footprint Network to calculate the Happy Planet Index score for each individual country. Unfortunately, that data isn’t available for every country.