Sustainable Cuba

Anyway, in response to my previous post about the 2010 Yale/Columbia study (see below) my friend Jem suggested I check the score of Cuba. I’ve just done it and it comes 9th overall and 2nd in its peer group, The America’s.

So, according to this study Cuba is the 9th best environmentally-performing country in the world and the second best in The America’s (second to Costa Rica only).

Old news perhaps? And, yes, it is.

Jem actually blogged about this in 2006. He read the 2006 WWF Living Planet Report and, in his own words (which I hope he doesn’t mind me replicating here) found;

“On page 19, in a section comparing the amount of resources each country is gobbling up in comparison to the social development they have acheived, as indicated by the UN’s Human Development Index, shows that only one country has achieved a level of social development and environmental protection that can be considered “sustainable development”. That country? Grey-painted communist Cuba”

Obviously there are explanations for this. See Jem’s 06 posting on Jem Bendell’s Journal. And the compilers of the 2010 Yale/Columbia study highlighted a lack of data and poor data sources in a New York Times article. Did Cuba massage the figures?!

A bit possibly, but the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Cuba is more sustainable than most.