The risky development ranking illusion

• The recent wildfires in California have highlighted the true cost of development models pursued by the world’s richest countries.

• The Human Development Index (HDI) projected these nations as aspirational models of development, but this disconnect between metrics and ecological realities is dangerous.

• The HDI overlooks the environmental pressures associated with high HDI scores, leading to the overshooting of planetary boundaries.

• High-income countries like Ireland, Norway, and Switzerland are among the world’s biggest resource consumers and carbon polluters per person.

• The Planetary Pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI) was introduced in 2020 to downgrade HDI scores for countries with high environmental impacts.

• The PHDI still ranks countries only in relation to one another rather than against absolute ecological limits.

• Middle-income countries like Costa Rica and Sri Lanka have achieved decent living standards that could theoretically be scaled globally without driving the planet towards climate and ecological collapse.

• The 2022 economic crisis revealed deep vulnerabilities and a legacy of majoritarian policies and ethnic tensions has stalled their progress.

• India needs to look for alternatives to the Nordic model, which is a local phenomenon and an unsustainable mirage when applied globally.

• True progress must mean more than GDP growth or higher HDI rankings; it must create a society where every citizen lives with dignity and safely within ecological boundaries.