Gross National Happiness

Gross National Happiness

I was researching the Himalayas and how climate change impacted them and the communities there for another class a while back and came across a very unique, small South Asian country called Bhutan. Unlike the other countries along the Himalayas like Nepal, India and the southern half of China, I had never heard of Bhutan before, and their environmental issues intrigued me.

Bhutan is a very small country, I would say about the size of Connecticut and has around 738,267 people living there. It is completely surrounded by India on the east, south, and west side of the country and surrounded by China's Tibetan region to the north. They have various problems with glacial melt due to climate change, as do the rest of the countries in the Himalayas. The most prominent issue with the glacier melt water is flash flooding, damaging building infrastructure and farmland and killing people and their cattle. Bhutan is a very poor country, and has to call on some international help in order to work on climate change relief efforts within the country.

But, what I found really intriguing about Bhutan, and what this post is supposed to be mainly about, is that Bhutan first opened it's borders less than forty years ago and in 1972 adopted a policy of gross national happiness (GNH) instead of gross domestic product. GNH is a policy that relies on various Buddhist values, such as spirituality. To measure their GNH, they use nine domains which rely on psychological well-being, health, education, time use, cultural diversity, and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards.

GNH led to Bhutan to have strong environmental protection policies, such as making the country carbon neutral and banning plastic bags. Bhutan has some of the most progressive environmental policies in the world among developing and developed countries. In a world of failing economies and poor environmental policies, it seems many other countries should consider adopting something similar to Bhutan's gross national happiness.

You can read more about the tiny kingdom of Bhutan where I researched the country at: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091021/pdf/4611042a.pdf, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/01/bhutan-wealth-happiness-counts
http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/
Or if you really are interested in this, you can watch this video on Youtube about Bhutan and it's gross national happiness. kind of interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJwNSkdTH0