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Egypt ranks 8th among Greater Mideast states on 2024 EPI
Egypt ranked the 8th among the Greater Middle East countries listed on the Yale University’s 2024 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) at a score of 43.8.
Egypt occupied the 99th position globally on the EPI which incorporates 58 indicators to rank 180 countries, including 16 Greater Middle East countries, on their progress at mitigating climate change, safeguarding ecosystem vitality, and promoting environmental health. This broad set of metrics is a powerful tool to track progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the climate mitigation targets in the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, and the biodiversity protection goals in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The 2024 EPI harnesses the latest data sets, science, and technology to provide the most comprehensive assessment of the state of sustainability around the world.
Overall EPI scores help identify which countries have been most successful at addressing a wide variety of global environmental challenges, spotlighting sustainability leaders, and calling out laggards. Delving into the details beyond overall scores—examining individual issue categories, indicators, and peer comparisons—provides a more nuanced understanding of the trends and drivers of environmental performance.
Responding to the urgency of halting biodiversity loss, the 2024 EPI introduces new metrics to assess how well countries protect their most important habitats.
The 2024 EPI also introduces pilot indicators to measure the effectiveness and stringency of protected areas. These new metrics track key issues related to the expansion of protected areas to meet the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s goal of safeguarding 30 percent of lands and seas by 2030. These pilot metrics reveal that, while many countries have reached their area protection goals, many protected areas have failed to halt the loss of natural ecosystems.
The 2024 EPI’s analyses underscore the necessity of providing protected areas with adequate funding and of developing stricter regulations in partnership with local communities.
EPI scores are positively correlated with a country’s wealth, although after a point, increasing wealth yields diminishing. At every level of economic development, though, some countries outperform their peers while others lag. And indeed, some of the poorest countries in the world outperform some of the richest.
In this regard, factors other than wealth, such as investments in human development, rule of law, and regulatory quality, are stronger predictors of environmental performance. With its broad set of metrics across a wide range of environmental issues, the 2024 EPI reveals fundamental tradeoffs across different aspects of environmental performance, underscoring that no country can claim to be on a fully sustainable trajectory.
Wealth allows countries to make investments in the infrastructure required to provide clean drinking water, safely manage waste, and rapidly expand renewable energy. But wealth also leads to higher material consumption and its associated environmental impacts, such as higher rates of waste generation, GHG emissions, and ecosystem degradation.
Many countries with high scores in some Ecosystem Vitality metrics — such as those measuring the pollution from pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture, the integrity of forest landscapes, and the use of destructive fishing methods — do so because their economies are stagnant and underdeveloped.
An unprecedented availability of environmental data, including exciting recent developments in machine learning and remote sensing, underpin the innovations introduced in the 2024 EPI. Nonetheless, crucial data gaps persist, creating serious challenges for robust, data-driven policymaking.
For years, the EPI team has called attention to the dearth of high-quality, standardized data on solid waste, toxic waste, and wastewater management around the world, especially in developing countries. These data gaps hamper the ability of policymakers to tackle the worsening plastic pollution crisis and to advance the world toward a circular economy.
The world also continues to lack robust data on the protection of wetlands, grasslands, and other important ecosystems that remain difficult to characterize with remote sensing technologies.
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