TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - We all dream of living a long, happy life. But where are the happiest places in the world?
A new map of 151 countries has revealed exactly which parts of the globe deliver long and happy lives for their citizens, within the environmental limits of the planet.
The results show that Costa Rica, Colombia and Vietnam topping the league. The UK features at position 44 - higher than Germany (47), Spain (62), Canada (65), Australia (76) and the US (105).
The map was compiled by the relocation website Movehub, using data from the latest Happy Planet Index (HPI) - a global measure of sustainable wellbeing.
The HPI claims it 'measures what matters', rather than wealth: the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them.
Each of the three component measures – life expectancy, the level of well-being experienced and ecological footprint – is given a traffic-light score based on thresholds for good (green), middling (amber) and bad (red) performance. These scores are combined to an expanded six-color traffic light for the overall HPI score, where, to achieve bright green – the best of the six colours, a country would have to perform well on all three individual components.
In order to compile the data, researchers directly asked people in each country for their views.
Experienced well-being: This was assessed using a question called the ‘Ladder of Life’ from the Gallup World Poll. This asks respondents to imagine a ladder, where 0 represents the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life, and report the step of the ladder they feel they currently stand on.
Life expectancy: Alongside experienced well-being, the Happy PIanet Index includes a universally important measure of health – life expectancy. We used life expectancy data from the 2011 UNDP Human Development Report.
Ecological Footprint. The HPI uses the Ecological Footprint promoted by the environmental charity WWF as a measure of resource consumption. It is a per capita measure of the amount of land required to sustain a country’s consumption patterns, measured in terms of global hectares (g ha) which represent a hectare of land with average productive biocapacity.
Two of the three main factors are directly about happiness. The third (Ecological footprint) is regarded as sustainable happiness. i.e. whether a country could sustain its citizens without any outside help.
The idea is that if there was an incident which cut a country completely off from the outside world, or a country had to be completely self-sufficient, most of the developed world would be unable to do that (without losing a lot of its population first).
The reason for some high-income nations to score significantly below other nations is the ecological footprint left on the planet.
DAILYMAIL | HAPPY PLANET INDEX | SINGGIH SOARES
