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href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/cuba-found-to-be-the-most-sustainably-developed-country-in-the-world-new-research-finds">https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/cuba-found-to-be-the-most-sustainably-developed-country-in-the-world-new-research-finds</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Cuba found to be the most sustainably
developed country in the world, new research finds</h1>
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<div> <time><span content="2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00">Friday,
November 29, 2019</span></time> </div>
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<p>CUBA is the most sustainably developed country in
the world, according to a new report launched today.</p>
<p>The socialist island outperforms advanced
capitalist countries including Britain and the
United States, which has subjected Cuba to a
punitive six-decades-long economic blockade.</p>
<p>The Sustainable Development Index (SDI), designed
by anthropologist and author Dr Jason Hickel,
calculates its results by dividing a nation’s “human
development” score, obtained by looking at
statistics on life expectancy, health and education,
by its “ecological overshoot,” the extent to which
the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth’s
natural limits.</p>
<p>Countries with strong human development and a lower
environmental impact score highly, but countries
with poorer life expectancies and literacy rates as
well as those which exceed ecological limits are
marked down.</p>
<p>Based on the most recent figures, from 2015, Cuba
is top with a score of 0.859, while Venezuela is
12th and Argentina 18th.</p>
<p>The SDI was created to update the Human Development
Index (HDI), developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub
ul Haq and used by the United Nations Development
Programme to produce its annual reports since 1990.</p>
<p>The HDI considers life expectancy, education and
gross national income per capita, but ignores
environmental degradation caused by the economic
growth of top performers such as Britain and the US.</p>
<p>“These countries are major contributors to climate
change and other forms of ecological breakdown,
which disproportionately affects the poorer
countries of the global South, where climate change
is already causing hunger rates to rise,” Mr Hickel
said.</p>
<p>“In this sense, the HDI promotes a model of
development that is empirically incompatible with
ecology and which embodies a fundamental
contradiction: achieving high development according
to HDI means driving de-development elsewhere in the
world. For a development indicator that purports to
be universal, such a contradiction is indefensible.”</p>
<p>Britain, ranked 14th in 2018’s HDI, falls to 131st
in the SDI, while the US, 13th in the ul Haq index,
is 159th out of 163 countries featured in the new
system. </p>
<p>Mr Hickel added: “The SDI ranking reveals that all
countries are still “developing” – countries with
the highest levels of human development still need
to significantly reduce their ecological impact,
while countries with the lowest levels of ecological
impact still need to significantly improve their
performance on social indicators.”</p>
<p><em>The SDI is available at <a
href="http://sustainabledevelopmentindex.org/">sustainabledevelopmentindex.org</a>.</em></p>
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