Environmental Access Metric (EAM)
How the Metric Works
What does it measure?
My metric takes into account three main values. Ease of access to the outdoors, environmental policies/how much CO2 a country releases, and number of national parks or amount of land that is protected. These were represented in data by the percentage of land coverage which is forest in combination with percentage of GDP from logging (more on that later), national revenue from ecotourism, CO2 emissions, percentage of urbanized population in combination with the urbanization rate, number of national parks, and percentage of protected land.
How does it measure it?
Norway used as an example
My metric takes the land coverage in forest and multiplies it by the percentage of GDP from logging.
33.48% forest x 0.05% of GDP = 1.674.
It then takes that number and divides the revenue from ecotourism in billions of USD by it.
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181/1.67 = 108.1.
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This number is then divisor of the amount of CO2 released every year in Megatons.
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41/108.1 = 0.38.
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For the next factor of our index, we divide the percentage of urban population by the rate of urbanization, then divide our result by the percentage of protected land.
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84% x 1.32% = 110.8/17 = 6.5
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For the final few steps, we multiply the previous factor of 0.38 by 6.5, and use the resulting number as the divisor of the total number of national parks/geo parks.
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0.38 x 6.5 = 2.47
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52/2.47 = 21.05
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Our final result is 21.05 on the EAM for Norway.
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Our final result for Pakistan is 0.23.
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Snapshot Analysis
The higher the number on the index, the better the performance. I was unsurprised by Norway's generally high performance, and though I wasn't terribly surprised about Pakistan's score, it is lower than I thought it would be. I think the biggest reasons for Norway's high performance are its large amounts of trees, as well as its very low CO2 release. In addition to this I believe it scored high due to higher number of national/geo parks and the huge amount of revenue from ecotourism. After seeing these results, though I expected a disparity between my two focus countries, I might weight the percentage of landmass that is forest combined with logging percentage of GDP less because that more heavily plays a role in countries with more forests.
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My index does well at taking into account a large number of factors that play a role in the environment. That said, it is limited by the fact that a country's forest cover and logging industry can vastly change the resulting values. For example, Pakistan has very little forest due to its climate, and even though the logging percentage of its GDP is about the same as Norway, it gave a vastly different result because of the lack of forest cover percentage. When looking at values from the index, this should be taken into account because it could be misinterpreted/misunderstood. It is very biased towards the northern hemisphere/more humid and wet climates with more forests. It is also somewhat reliant on countries with stable enough governments and economy to be able to have designated protected lands and parks, as countries with weaker economies or unstable governments may need the land for farming/agriculture etc.
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