Last week I tried to adjust the raw U.S. rating on the EPI for GDP per capita and region of the world (How is the U.S. really doing on the 2006 EPI). I found that the U.S. ranking of 28th overall is about right. Based on these predictive factors the U.S. ranking should be 29th.
It turns out that the U.S. performance is all over the place when broken down by category (click on the thumbnail). There are two main categories in the overall EPI: Environmental Health and Ecosystem Vitality and Natural Resource Management. The U.S. is doing just fine in the former category (and so are most rich countries) and surprisingly lousy in the latter.
Using the same methodology as before, the predicted ranking for Environmental Health is 29th when the actual ranking is 12th. The predicted ranking for Ecosystem Vitality and Natural Resource Management is 74th and the actual ranking is 98th (out of 133: OUCH).
Some details:
The EPI is weighted 50/50 for the two main categories. The Ecosystem category is made up of 5 policy categories: air quality, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources and sustainable energy. Our actual performance is near last for productive natural resources (125/133) and we should be doing better (prediction is 112 [still not good]). Each of these policy categories is weighted 10% in the overall EPI.
Environmental Health and the five policy categories are measured by "indicators." These are the variables in the left hand column of the picture with weights in parentheses. The indicators are "resisting modelling efforts" but I'll post something on these soon.
