diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 3952b51..26bbcb3 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -1,5 +1,4 @@ -Fossil-Fuels-and-HDI: Carbon emissions as an indicator of human human standards of living. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ +# Fossil-Fuels-and-HDI: Carbon emissions as an indicator of human human standards of living. Laura Vodden @@ -22,3 +21,10 @@ In order to conduct this investigation, data was cleaned and analysed in RStudio The report finds that there is a difference between CO2 emissions in high and low HDI countries, CO2 emissions do generally increase with HDI, and that population is not a good predictor for CO2 emissions and therefore HDI. The conclusion drawn from this report is that a CO2 emissions (indicative of a country’s economic wealth) do tend to increase with the wellbeing of its people, as indicated by HDI. This suggests that economic wealth and human development go hand in hand, since the countries with the highest HDIs also had the highest CO2 emissions, however the countries producing the highest emissions were not necessarily the most populous, indicating that population is not a significant contributor to either HDI or CO2 emissions. + + +# Introduction +The Human Development Index (HDI) is an indicator of a country’s level of development, expressed as a unitless average of three dimensions: health, education and income (Wolff et al., 2011). A country’s development index can be categorised as low (0.0 to 0.5), medium (0.5 to 0.8) and high (0.8 to 1.0). +The HDI can be used to demonstrate global inequality in wealth, living standards and even carbon emissions (Chancel & Piketty, 2015; Oxfam, 2015). Motivated by an interest in how carbon emissions can highlight the uneven distribution of wealth, this report aims to use global environmental data from 2014 (the most recent Gapminder data available) to test whether there is a difference between total CO2 emissions in high and low HDI countries, whether CO2 emissions per person +increase with HDI, and whether a country’s population can be used to its total CO2 emissions. +