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Vanuatu — the happiest place on earth

Duncan Campbell

Its people are satisfied with their lot, live to nearly 70 and do little damage to the planet.

THE MOST happy place on the planet is the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, according to a radical new index published on Wednesday. The index has been compiled to draw attention to the fact that it is not necessary to use up the earth's resources to achieve long life and happiness.

The innovative global measure of progress, the Happy Planet Index, has been constructed by the New Economics Foundation (Nef) and Friends of the Earth using three factors: life expectancy, human well-being, and damage done via a country's "environmental footprint."

Vanuatu comes top because its people are satisfied with their lot, live to nearly 70 and do little damage to the planet. Zimbabwe takes bottom place in the table. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia, countries that have experienced recent civil upheavals, all feature in the top 10 on the grounds that they do little environmental harm and manage comparatively high levels of satisfaction with life.

The big industrial nations fare badly. Britain is 108th, below Libya, Gabon, and Azerbaijan. The U.S. is 150th and Russia is 172nd, near the bottom of the 178 nations for which statistics are available.

"Don't tell too many people, please," was the response of Marke Lowen of Vanuatu Online, the country's online newspaper, to the news that Vanuatu had topped the poll. "People are generally happy here because they are very satisfied with very little. This is not a consumer-driven society. Life here is about community and family and goodwill to other people. It's a place where you don't worry too much.

"Most people here live day to day. The only things we fear are cyclones or occasional earthquakes." People in Vanuatu considered themselves "caretakers" of the land.

Life satisfaction varies greatly from country to country: asked how satisfied they were with their lives, on a scale of one to 10, 29 per cent of Zimbabweans, who have a life expectancy of 37, rate themselves at one and only 6 per cent rate themselves at 10. In contrast, 28 per cent of Danes score their life-satisfaction at 10 out of 10 while fewer than 1 per cent rate it at one.

The real message, however, that the survey seeks to convey is that the environmental damage being done by the wealthier nations, presumably in the pursuit of happiness and long life, may have the opposite effect. Two factors are cited for the low showing of many countries: those recently adopting market economies and those badly affected by HIV/AIDS do worst. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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