Traditionally Green is the colour associated with all that is environmentally sustainable while Green House Gases have added considerable colour to recent discussions on development. Ensuring sustainability is seen as a constraint in meeting the imperative for maintaining high levels of economic growth. While considerable theoretical developments have taken place in economics on characterizing sustainability, operationalising the concept remains difficult for most developing economies. Consider for instance, Goal 7 of the MDGs on ensuring sustainability. What do the available indicators that can be used for monitoring progress on getting at this target tell us about the sustainability of development taking place in South Asia?

We computed correlations between indicators of sustainable development and economic growth for a set of countries in South Asia for 2004-2005. As per the Environmental Sustainability Indices (ESI) generated by a research group at Yale University, India ranked 101 as compared to China (133) and Sri Lanka (79). At first glance there are no obvious conclusions to be drawn in terms of size of the economy (GDP, population, area) and the environmental sustainability of its growth.

However, the correlation between growth rate of GDP and the ESI for South Asia turns out to be positive and reasonably high at 0.62 while the correlation between growth rate of GDP and CO2 emissions for the region is also positive and high at 0.72. Note that the ESI incorporates data on a wide range of variables including fresh water availability, threatened species, SO2 and NO2 emissions, generation of hazardous waste and water pollutant, death rate from respiratory diseases and natural disasters, forest area under sustainable management and carbon emissions amongst others.

So on average, South Asia’s development does give sufficient cause for concern about the sustainability of the current growth patterns. The correlation between ESI and GDP is bad news and should be taken seriously even if one is a non-believer in global warming! So while the debate on the appropriate parameters for characterization of ES continues, the key question to research on both for India and South Asia in general is – how best can the current policies on economic growth accommodate concerns on ES.