Changes Toward Sustainability: A Review of Countries’ Performances

Here, changes in sustainability are assessed using statistical data for all countries between 1990 and 2015, with a focus on the fifteen most populous countries. The indicators used cover GDP for the economy; poverty, education, and health for human capabilities; as well as environmental impacts on water, climate, air, and bioresources. An authoritative model is used to describe the environmental impacts, resulting from pressures driven by population and affluence; and responses, through decreasing resource intensity, measured by the resource use per GDP, and improving environmental efficiency, defined as emissions per resource use. Resource intensity decreases in most countries. Environmental efficiency improves for wastewater and NOx, hardly changes for CO2, and increases in nature protection areas, but this rarely compensates for deforestation. The combination of pressures and responses reduced water pollution and air pollution, and mitigated climate change in high-income countries, but did not reduce the degradation of biodiversity. While the pressures, responses, and environmental impacts of economic growth vary across all countries, twenty-five growing economies have reduced those environmental impacts. Changes toward sustainability are discussed with regard to the growing share of services in economies in the ‘EKC hypothesis’, innovation for achieving higher value at lower impact in the ‘green growth’ idea, and regulations that lead to profitable environmental investments in the ‘Porter hypothesis’. Combined, they only partially explain the changes because they ignore the low prices of natural resources and high shareholder consumption. Additionally, regulations are needed that increase the price of environmental impacts relative to the price of man-made resources and enforce high-quality performance standards.