By Wendy Anders

“People the world over say what is most important to them is to be happy,” said British environmentalist Nic Marks, creator of the Happy Planet Index, in a TED talk on his work.

If so, then our current methods for measuring success and progress have it all wrong, he continued.

When a country achieves wellbeing, with a low impact on the environment, then, says Marks, they are successful.

Countries such as Costa Rica, which for the third year has topped the index, are models for our planet’s future, said Marks, who hope his index provides a tool to chart a positive path for the environmental movement which he feels for too long has presented a nightmarish future to the public, instilling fear rather than hope.

Based on the globally renowned Gallup World Poll on wellbeing which asks respondents to subjectively rate their sense of their lives, the Happy Planet Index (HPI) also considers a country’s ecological footprint, equality, and health indicators such as life expectancy in its ranking.

“People living in Costa Rica have higher wellbeing than the residents of many rich nations, including the USA and the UK, and live longer than people in the USA. And all of this is achieved with a per capita ecological footprint that’s just one third of the size of the USA’s,” says the HPI site.

“If the ultimately goal of a nation is to create happy citizens, then why do our news stations only discuss gross domestic product and stock market indicators that point to finance?” asks Marks. He suggests our media should give us real-time statistics on how much and what type of energy we are using, and how much our nations have advanced on meeting carbon reduction goals.

“Wealthy Western countries, often seen as the standard of success, do not rank highly on the Happy Planet Index. Instead, several countries in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region lead the way by achieving high life expectancy and wellbeing with much smaller ecological footprints.

The Happy Planet Index provides a compass to guide nations, and shows that it is possible to live good lives without costing the Earth,” says the HPI site.

An index, however is just that, it offers a snapshot with a limited view. It doesn’t mean country’s who are ranked as happy don’t have their share of problems and disparities. HPI researchers also concluded that Costa Rica needs to improve is income inequality and say that “the tax system does not effectively redistribute wealth across the population.”

“And while Costa Rica’s commitment to environmental sustainability is impressive, its ecological footprint isn’t yet small enough to be completely sustainable,” say the HPI developers.