What is wealth on a happy planet?

From New Scientist -  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428694.800-us-fails-on-happy-planet-index.html :
"IT'S easy not to trash the planet - if you're dirt poor and die young. But is it possible for all of us to live long and satisfying lives without costing the Earth? That's the question behind a measure of national well-being called the Happy Planet Index (HPI). Its latest update, released this week ahead of the Rio+20 summit on sustainable development, names Costa Rica as the world's most "developed" nation and puts the US on the sick list.

To show how different the world looks when viewed according to the HPI, rather than conventional wealth, New Scientist applied distorting lenses. In the top map, countries are sized according to their GDP, and shaded by GDP per capita. As sub-Saharan Africa almost shrinks from view, western Europe, the US and Japan swell and flush a deep red.

But this wealth has fuelled massively unsustainable use of natural resources (see "Peak planet: are we starting to consume less?"). Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation in London developed HPI as an alternative measure, "to capture the tension between good lives now and good lives in the future".

HPI measures nations' success in delivering long and contented lives, the latter determined by a survey question. These scores are then diminished according to each nation's ecological footprint: the total area needed to provide the average citizen's food and other materials, and to absorb their carbon dioxide emissions.

In the larger map, countries are shaded according to HPI scores, with deeper greens showing countries that are most efficient at converting natural resources into long and satisfying lives for their citizens. Nations are sized according to HPI multiplied by population, giving a "gross" HPI comparable to GDP. This helps reveal countries whose sustainability will most influence the planet's overall health.

There are various ways to achieve a good HPI score. Latin American nations tend to do well on life satisfaction, but Costa Rica stands out for pushing life expectancy beyond the US average and adopting strong environmental policies. Other surprising "winners" include Bangladesh, where 150 million people, crowded into an area smaller than Florida, have made impressive gains in human development despite meagre consumption.

The US provides a strong contrast. Its people live long, reasonably contented lives, but their profligate consumption explains the nation's pale and emaciated appearance on our HPI map.

The big question is whether China and India can limit their footprints and turn their already large and rapidly growing economies a deeper green. The best hope, says Saamah Abdallah, lead author of the new HPI report, is that "enlightened self-interest" will send them down a more sustainable path (see "China leads the march for the green economy"). "They're not going to enjoy what we have in the west," he says, because available resources won't allow it.

Everyone else, and especially the US and other high-consuming nations, will also have to pull their weight. Even Costa Rica's footprint is too large to be sustainable in the long run, says Mathis Wackernagel of the Global Footprint Network in Oakland, California. And if China's development continues to depend on satisfying the US's insatiable demand for consumer goods, it will be hard to chart a sustainable course.

Given the Earth's limited resources, a change of direction is badly needed for everyone's good, says Marks: "There's no Planet B.""