Methodology
Governments Must Protect Ecosystems
- Protection of Ecosystems is crucial, but it will not be carried out by effectively through individual action or through the private market.
- (We should cite the classic results in environmental economics here.)
- Only governments have the capacity, resources, and territorial sovereignty necessary to take action at a large scale
- Localism and federalism? How should we talk about these?
Composition of the Ecosystem Category
The Ecosystem category contains two indicators:
- Protection of Biodiversity (hereinafter "Biodiversity," or BIODIV); and
- IUCN Red List Index (hereinafter "Red List," or REDLST).
The Biodiverisity is a direct quantification of country policy, while Red List is an outcome proxy metric.
Data Availability
Other Possible Measurements
Variance Imposed by Geographic and Ecological Endowments
Different countries vary considerably in land area, climate, coastal area, geography, and topography, which means that countries vary in the kinds of ecosystems they support.
A small country like Singapore (SGP) or Luxembourg (LUX) may have capacity for significantly more targeted policies for identifying and protecting key ecosystems than a large country like China (CHN) or India (IND). There can simply be more administrative attention per unit land area in small countries than in large countries.
Additionally, the smaller the country, the less likely that that country encapsulates the whole ecological range of any particular species. Diversification of policies affecting a particular species or ecosystem makes it less likely that that particular species will face extinctino because of ecological mismanagement... (We definitely need to support that claim.)
Finally, some countries have unique ecological sites for which they are primarily responsible. A canonical example is Brazil (BRA), which holds territorial sovereignty over the globally critical ecosystems in the Amazon Basin. Brazil