Iceland Leads Environmental Index As U.S. Falls

A new ranking of the world’s nations by environmental performance puts some of the globe’s largest economies far down the list, with the United States sinking to 61st and China to 121st. In the previous version of the Environmental Performance Index, compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers, the United States ranked 39th, and China 105th. The top performer this year is Iceland... The lack of reliable environmental data is a major challenge, the researchers said. “There are so many countries that are not collecting even minimal data sets,” said Christine Kim, a researcher at Yale who is program manager of the project. “The state of the data hasn’t gotten much better in the last 10 years. We have better data on... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/science/earth/27index.html?partner=rss&emc=rss