An interactive dashboard of my quantitative research on human wellbeing and ecological sustainability across the five Nordic countries.
Live dashboard: https://mermina.github.io/beyond-gdp-nordics/
Three "beyond-GDP" measures of human wellbeing — the Human Development Index, the Social Progress Index and the SDG Index — set against the Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity from the National Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts I compiled, for the five Nordic countries across 2000–2022:
- an indicator snapshot per country, each value against the world benchmark
- the "Nordic paradox" — high wellbeing alongside a footprint far past a one-planet share
- ecological balance: consumption vs regeneration, by period
- whether the footprint decouples from rising wellbeing over time
- Pearson correlations between each index and the footprint, by country
- an indicator-level drill-down showing what the flattering headline scores hide
The wider qualitative work — mapping each Nordic country's national wellbeing framework onto the OECD Wellbeing dimensions and the UN SDGs — is in the full write-up rather than here.
Indicators assembled in MySQL (three databases joined, including the NFBA accounts I produced), analysed in R, reproduced in Python, and visualised as a single self-contained HTML page — no frameworks, no build step. The SQL behind the numbers is viewable inside the dashboard.
Ermina, M. (2025), Exploring Indicators of Human Wellbeing and Ecological Sustainability in the Nordic Countries, MA thesis, University of Iceland — full text.
— Marina Ermina