India ranks 77th on sustainability: UN report
   Date :21-Feb-2020
India ranks 77th on susta
 
 
By Yoshita Singh :
 
UNITED NATIONS,
 
The nation was placed on 131st in child flourishing index rankings.
 
Norway leads the table for survival, health, education and nutrition rates - followed by South Korea and the Netherlands. Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia come at the bottom. 
 
INDIA ranked 77th on a sustainability index that takes into account per capita carbon emissions and ability of children in a nation to live healthy lives and was placed 131st on a ranking that measures the best chance at survival and well-being for children, according to a UN-backed report. The report was released on Wednesday by a commission of over 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world. It was commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and The Lancet medical journal.
 
In the report assessing the capacity of 180 countries to ensure that their youngsters can survive and thrive, India ranks 77th on the Sustainability Index and 131 on the Flourishing Index, it said. Flourishing is the geometric mean of Surviving and Thriving. For Surviving, the authors selected maternal survival, survival in children younger than 5 years old, suicide, access to maternal and child health services, basic hygiene and sanitation, and lack of extreme poverty.
 
For Thriving, the domains were educational achievement, growth and nutrition, reproductive freedom, and protection from violence. Under the Sustainability Index, the authors noted that promoting today’s national conditions for children to survive and thrive must not come at the cost of eroding future global conditions for children’s ability to flourish. The Sustainability Index ranks countries on excess carbon emissions compared with the 2030 target. This provides a convenient and available proxy for a country’s contribution to sustainability in future.
 
The report noted that under realistic assumptions about possible trajectories towards sustainable greenhouse gas emissions, models predict that global carbon emissions need to be reduced from 39·7 giga­ tonnes to 22·8 gigatonnes per year by 2030 to maintain even a 66 per cent chance of keeping global warming below 1·50C. It said that the world’s survival depended on children being able to flourish, but no country is doing enough to give them a sustainable future.
 
“No country in the world is currently providing the conditions we need to support every child to grow up and have a healthy future,” said Anthony Costello, Professor of Global Health and Sustainability at University College London, one of the lead authors of the report. “Especially, they’re under immediate threat from climate change and from commercial marketing, which has grown hugely in the last decade,” said Costello – former WHO Director of Mother, Child and Adolescent health. Norway leads the table for survival, health, education and nutrition rates - followed by South Korea and the Netherlands. Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia come at the bottom.