The 2014 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 178 countries on 20 performance indicators across 9 policy categories, including health impacts, air quality, water resources, agriculture, forests, fisheries, biodiversity, and climate. The dataset includes 2014 scores, backcast scores from 2002-2012, and time-series source data. It was produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University's CIESIN and released at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 25, 2014.
Use Cases
- Benchmarking national environmental health based on proximity-to-target methodology
- Analyzing trends in ecosystem vitality using backcast scores from 2002-2012
- Comparing country performance within economic or regional peer groups
- Evaluating progress on specific policy categories like air quality or water resources
Strengths
- Rankings for 178 countries provide broad geographic coverage
- Includes 20 performance indicators across 9 distinct policy categories
- Contains backcast EPI scores for a 10-year period (2002-2012)
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
- Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to a 2014 snapshot
Provenance
- Source
- Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)
- Collection Method
- Collaborative research using a proximity-to-target methodology
- Time Range
- Primary scores for 2014, with backcast data for 2002-2012
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-03-05 19:51:20.131749; freshness should be verified
- Geography
- 178 countries worldwide