Environments for Happiness: An Overview
John F. Helliwell Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia
Richard Layard Wellbeing Programme, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science
Jeffrey D. Sachs Director, SDSN; Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve Director, Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford
Acknowledgment: The authors are grateful for advice and research contributions from Lara Aknin, Martijn Burger, Lewis Dijkstra, Jon Hall, Haifang Huang, Christian Krekel, George MacKerron, Max Norton, Shun Wang, and Meik Wiking.
This year the World Happiness Reportfocuses especially on the environment – social, urban, and natural.
After presenting our usual country rankings and explanations of life evaluations in Chapter 2, we turn to these three categories of environment, and how they affect happiness.
The social environment is dealt with in detail in the later parts of Chapter 2. It is also a main focus of Chapter 7, which looks at happiness in the Nordic countries and finds that higher personal and institutional trust are key factors in explaining why life evaluations are so high in those countries.
Urban life is the focus of Chapter 3, which examines the happiness ranking of cities, and of Chapter 4, which compares happiness in cities and rural areas across the world. An Annex considers recent international efforts to develop common definitions of urban, peri-urban, and rural communities.
The natural environment is the focus of Chapter 5, which examines how the local environment affects happiness. Chapter 6 takes a longer and broader focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The wide range of the SDGs links them to all three of the environmental themes considered in other chapters.
In the rest of this Overview chapter, we synthesize the main findings relating to the three environmental themes. We then conclude with a brief summary of the individual chapters whose results are being reviewed here.