Forty-fifth Out of 146

This is the ranking of the United States in the newly released 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index, a joint product of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the Center for Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the World Economic Forum. The top five countries in this index are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland respectively.

In the main report there is a figure (Figure 3) that illuminates the position of the United States well. This is a scatterplot and regression of the environmental sustainability index agains the per capita gross domestic product. Despite having the highest per capita GDP, the United States falls well below the regression line. In other words, the United States is performing poorly when you take into account its wealth level.