Outside In | Vietnam, the unlikely poster child for a sustainable lifestyle

A fascinating piece of research by a team at Leeds University in Britain, examining the performance of around 150 countries worldwide in terms of their social progress, and the unsustainable damage they are inflicting on the environment, shows a dreadful link. We simply don’t seem to be able to improve people’s livelihoods without using more resources than the planet can afford. 

No one is doing well – except, improbably, Vietnam. Worst of all is the United States, which is one of five countries that are exceeding their “quota” of resource use or environmental harm by every one of the seven criteria measured by the team led by Daniel O’Neill, who leads the Economics and Policy for Sustainability Research Group at the University of Leeds. 

The team took 11 measures of social progress – life satisfaction, years of healthy life, nutrition, sanitation, sufficient income, access to energy, education, social support, democratic rights, income inequality and employment rates – and found huge progress not just among the rich Western economies, but also among large numbers of still relatively disadvantaged countries. Surprisingly, countries like the Philippines, India and South Africa seem to have made poor progress. 

But map all those high-achieving countries in terms of their planetary footprint, and this progress seems to have come at a very high price. Taking seven effects on limited global resources – the amount of materials a country uses, its land and ocean exploitation, crop and forest losses, freshwater use, nitrogen discharges, phosphorous discharges, and carbon dioxide emissions – the team discovered that the only countries living within the limits of sustainability were poor countries that have made poor social progress. Countries like Bangladesh and Malawi – and yes, the Philippines, India and Indonesia.