A new way to measure development —
one that counts the planet.
Borgil Surenkhuu · Director, Green Resilience Institute · Mongolia
The Anthropocene
Human activity is now an Earth-system force.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries are breached. The dashed ring is the safe operating space —
the envelope that held for the whole of human civilisation.
And nobody has bought wellbeing cheaply. The top-left corner — high development at low
Earth cost — has no one in it.
Three questions
Each index answers a different question.
GDP
How much is produced?
EconomySocietyEnvironment
HDI
How well do people live?
EconomySocietyEnvironment
GDI
At what Earth cost?
EconomySocietyEnvironment
The third question is not harder to answer than the other two.We already collect the data. We have simply never combined it.
The origin
A Mongolian idea, fifteen years in the making.
01
2011 · Nature — “Time to stop celebrating the polluters”
Dr. T. Chuluun publishes the first proposal to add per-capita CO₂ emissions to the
Human Development Index — so that development rankings stop rewarding pollution.
02
2022 · Green Resilience Institute founded
An NGO set up in Ulaanbaatar to build the index, presenting it at the
Science Summits at UNGA 77 and 78 in New York.
03
2022–2025 · Searching and testing the best indicator
Candidate measures tested against the published UN and remote-sensing series,
country by country, to find the ones the index could stand on.
04
2025–2026 · The Green Development Index conceptualised
The index defined and calculated for
192 countries and economies — the results in this presentation.
Formula · data · methodology
Three indexes go in. One comes out.
GDI=HDI×EI
The data is already on the table:UNDP’s HDI, per-capita CO₂, and SDG 15.3.1 land degradation — three
numbers every country already reports, so all 192 can be scored with no new burden.
Paper, methodology and all 192 country scoresdoi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17514520
drag to spin
The first global calculation
One planet, rescored.
The Green Development Index, computed for
192 countries and economies — every dot on the globe coloured by its
country’s score.
HighLow
83 very high · 80 high · 29 medium
Find your country
Scan for the full ranking — all 192 GDI scores, and the move from HDI.
What changes
Count the planet, and the league table turns over.
Largest falls
Qatar−136
Bahrain−131
United Arab Emirates−119
Kazakhstan−98
Canada−94
United States−92
Largest rises
Tuvalu+69
Jordan+68
Eswatini+65
Egypt+64
Botswana+63
India+50
120 of 192 countries rise when the
planet is counted. The GDI is not a penalty on the developing world — for most of it,
it is a correction in its favour.
Photo · Unsplash
The mechanism
There are only two ways to fall.
Fell on carbon
High per-capita CO₂ drives the environmental index toward zero.
Qatar−136
Bahrain−131
United Arab Emirates−119
Brunei Darussalam−118
Trinidad and Tobago−108
Kazakhstan−98
Kuwait−95
Canada−94
United States−92
Saudi Arabia−77
Australia−60
Russian Federation−58
Oman−56
Fell on land
A large share of the territory assessed as degraded under SDG 15.3.1.
Armenia−94
Singapore−91
Antigua and Barbuda−84
Turkmenistan−81
Azerbaijan−68
Bulgaria−60
Malta−57
Nauru−57
Bosnia and Herzegovina−52
This is a diagnosis, not a scolding.The colour of a country’s fall tells its government which lever is theirs —
the power sector, or the land.
What the data shows
The higher the development, the heavier the footprint.
This is not an argument against development.
It is evidence that the pathway the world has used so far is paid for in land and atmosphere —
and that the bill has never appeared on the scoreboard.
The synergy
One indicator of synergy between the Rio Conventions.
UNFCCC · Climate Change
Towards net-zero emissions, negotiated through NDCs and the global stocktake.
SDG 13 · Climate action
UNCCD · Desertification
Towards land degradation neutrality, through national LDN targets and SDG 15.3.1.
SDG 15.3 · Land
GDIone score, both
The GDI moves only when the whole picture improves.You cannot climb it by decarbonising while your rangeland collapses, and you cannot climb it
by restoring land while your power sector burns.
Over to you
Questions.
Scan the code for the full Green Development Index —
all 192 country scores, each country’s environmental index, and the move from its HDI rank.
Green Resilience Institute
Full List, summary, and presentation
grinst.org
Borgil Surenkhuu— Director, Green Resilience Institute NGO, Mongolia Баярлалаа — Thank you.