The Most Sustainable Countries in the World (2026 Rankings)

Every two years, a group of very clever people publish a study on how sustainable each country of the world is. This report, called the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), ranks each country on how well they’re actually looking after the place. 

The 2026 edition of the EPI was released in early July. As always, it has thrown up its fair share of surprises, so we’re delving into who’s leading the pack, and where Australia fits into the mix. 

What is the Environmental Performance Index?

The Environmental Performance Index is put together every two years by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and Columbia University. You can think of it as a school report card, except the students are entire countries and getting a bad grade could be an indicator of future environmental collapse. 

No pressure then.

The 2026 edition ranks 177 countries using 47 separate indicators, grouped into 12 issue categories. Those categories then roll up into three big-picture objectives. Those are:

• Environmental health

• Ecosystem vitality

• Climate change

Every country then gets measured on these objectives and given an EPI score out of 100. The reason EPI gets quoted so often (and why we’re covering it too) is that it runs on legitimate, measured data – as opposed to what governments say about themselves. It also tracks how these countries have shifted over the last decade. 

The top 10 most sustainable countries in the world

Without further ado, here’s the 2026 leaderboard:

Who is improving and who isn’t?

Estonia is the story of this index, up 23 points, the biggest gain of any country in the world. In 2022 they were sitting down in 14th; now they’re number one. This is largely down to them shutting off their oil shale plants and their drastic reduction in energy generation emissions. 

But Estonia isn't the only one on the up and up. Oman, Afghanistan, Suriname, Bhutan and the UAE have all improved by more than 13 points over the last decade. 

Others have slipped though. Denmark topped the index in 2022 and now sits in 11th. Malta has fallen considerably from 4th to 26th, Iceland from 10th to 28th, and Switzerland – the runaway winner back in 2018 – is now 15th.

A caveat to these numbers is that cross-year rank comparisons can be a bit rubbery as the EPI reworks its methodology between editions. 

Europe ran the table

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that literally every single country in the top ten is European. But guess what? It’s actually almost the entire top 20 – with Japan being the only non-European nation in there at 16th. 

Strong environmental health scores and rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are doing a lot of heavy lifting to achieve those scores. But there’s always a catch, and in this case it’s that a lot of the strategies driving European success to date are reaching their natural limits. 

Most notably, agriculture is the main struggle for the world’s greenest region. Farming comes with a hefty environmental bill and, according to the research summary, European nations are still struggling to find a way to pay it. 

So is the world actually getting better?

Mmmm yes but also no.

Air pollution is the brightest metric. Many countries have made some pretty measurable gains in that area since the last edition, and the overwhelming majority of nations have lifted their overall score over the past decade (over 80%). So that’s a win. 

But progress has slowed down on just about everything else. That’s not to say other things aren’t improving, but it’s the rate of improvement that is giving the most cause for concern. Wider pollution control and natural resource management have slowed to a crawl, and hardly anyone is on track to hit net zero by 2050. A goal like that requires big emissions cuts year after year and most countries just don’t have policies in place to do that yet. 

Then there’s the grasslands issue. You know those wide open expanses that store huge amounts of the world’s carbon? Well they’re not looking good. The 2026 index includes a brand new satellite-based measure of grassland health, and the first proper look found that half the world's grasslands are already degraded and the trend isn’t improving. We didn’t even measure this metric until recently and it makes you wonder what else we’re missing. 

Where does Australia rank?

We landed at 25th out of 177 with a score of 59.4. Assessing whether this is good or bad is tricky. That rank puts us in the top 15% worldwide. But if you look at just the ‘Global West’, we come in 17th out of 22 countries – the bottom 27%. 

With that said, we are improving. Australia’s score is up almost six points over the past decade, but in an economy that’s capable of so much more, six points in a decade doesn’t feel like too much to shout about. 

What this means for Aussie households

Granted, these rankings take into account many things that you or I couldn’t possibly control. And much of what these numbers say has more to do with how well our politicians are doing than how we as people are doing. 

But the biggest thing that we can control as everyday Australians is how well we manage our waste. It doesn’t take much, but when millions of people make small, boring decisions the right way, it adds up quickly. 

We can do much better, and you can be a part of that. So you might as well start where you’re standing, grab yourself a set of colour-coded bins and let’s start contributing to the solutions.