NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Today the Yale Data-Driven Environmental Solutions Group (Data-Driven Yale) researchers released a new tool that allows users to see how “green” countries are relative to one another.

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) provides a snapshot that only scratches the surface of how countries perform on critical ecosystem and human health issues. After analyzing their national scores, countries sometimes undertake more detailed studies at the subnational scale to investigate areas for improvement at jurisdictions best positioned to enact local change. In narrowing the scope to a single country, governments are also able to tailor indicator frameworks to environmental outcomes most relevant to their country contexts.

One year ago this month, Malaysia launched the second iteration of its state-level Environmental Performance Index, the Malaysia EPI (or MyEPI), which showed the nation’s gains since its inaugural 2012 assessment. The country reduced its environmental burden of disease – meaning fewer of its people were sickened by environmental hazards – from 2012 to 2014, and its agriculture and land-use, resource efficiency, and environmental governance scores also improved.

If there ever was a gathering of people who fully subscribe to the adage,  ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure,’ this was it.

“The 2016 EPI ranks 180 countries—our greatest number ever,” declared Kim Samuel, Director of the Samuel Group of Companies, Professor of Practice at McGill University, and co-founder of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). “It covers 99 percent of the world’s population and 97 percent of global land area,” Ms. Samuel continued in her opening remarks at the May 9 Global Metrics for the Environment event held at UN Headquarters in New York City.