China Environmental Performance Index
中国环境绩效指数

China's environmental situation has become a focus of debate both within China and across the world. The scrutiny has intensified as China overtook the US as the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter in 2007. The attention only grew as China has struggled to alleviate Beijing's air pollution woes leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games. China's pollution problems go beyond air quality. In addition, the World Bank reports that half of the Chinese population may be drinking contaminated water. And the country may have lost up to one-fifth of its arable land to soil erosion and economic development in the past 60 years. China's degraded environment threatens the health of its people and its capacity for sustained economic growth. While China itself will bear the bulk of the costs for the lost vitality of its ecosystems, the harmful consequences reach far beyond the country's borders. Policymakers, both inside and outside of China, have a pressing need for firmer analytic foundations on which to build pollution control and natural resource management programs. Sound data and provincial-scale environmental metrics can help to spot critical issues, track trends, identify priority issues, evaluate policy success, and target funding. Better environmental data and fact-based analysis as well as commitment to transparency and vigorous policy debate can help China move onto a more sustainable development trajectory.

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy has been a world leader in developing national-scale environmental indices since 1998, working closely with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. The most recent of these reports, the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), provides national policymakers with a scientifically accurate and easily applicable tool for advancing data-driven environmental decisionmaking. The 2008 EPI ranks 149 countries by their proximity to targets for 25 indicators and allows countries to benchmark their management against that of their neighbors and peers. The EPI, however, only addresses environmental issues at the national scale. Given China's diverse geographical landscapes and fairly autonomous local governments, a sub-national index will be a more effective tool for that country's development of focused yet flexible environmental policy.

In partnership with the Ministry of Environmental Protection's Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, City University of Hong Kong, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy proposes to launch an environmental performance index that will assess management and performance in a broad range of environmental categories at the provincial level in China. The outcome of this exercise will be a Pilot 2009 China Environmental Performance Index, a composite index of current Chinese environmental results and protection. To be released in the fall of 2009, the report will rank China's provinces on categories such as air pollution, water quality and quantity, environmental health, climate change, biodiversity, fisheries, agriculture, and forestry. Recognizing that on-the-ground conditions are the measure of environmental performance, the China EPI will focus on quantifiable outcomes that can be linked to policy targets and tracked over time.

The report will be available in both English and Chinese with full analysis and data available via a written report and supplementary website. This will facilitate access to the China EPI as a valuable resource for Chinese policymakers, international organizations, and the general public alike. The goal of this project is not merely to produce a report, but to build a foundation for more quantitative and systematic analysis of environmental policy. It will allow the government not only to see which provincial practices work and which do not, but also to see which practices are the most effective. This joint effort has the potential of giving national and provincial-level policymakers, the capacity to make real and effective changes to China's environmental management.

Like the global EPI, the comparative analysis offered by the China Environmental Performance Index will facilitate tracking trends, identifying leaders and laggards, and highlighting "best practices." The China EPI will provide a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of the broader spectrum of Chinese environmental challenges which will help the Chinese government effectively address the most pressing environmental concerns, set priorities for allocation of resources, and build a practical framework for sustainable development in the future.