Bhutan: The First Carbon Negative Country In The World
Bhutan is the world’s first carbon negative country. Mainly because of its extensive forests, covering 70% of the land, the Kingdom is able to absorb more carbon dioxide than it produces. How did Bhutan get here and how can the country be an example for the rest of the world?
Bhutan is both the happiest and also the greenest country in the world. In the past 50 years, the Bhutanese government chose to measure progress beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP), by focussing instead on the Gross National Happiness (GNH) and placing emphasis on environmental protection.
GDP, a measure of an economy’s growth, is the standard unit to measure a nation’s economic strength between years. While traditional development models emphasise economic growth as the ultimate goal, the Gross National Happiness notion is based on the idea that human societies grows when material and spiritual development take place side by side to complement and strengthen one another.
Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in the eastern Himalayas of South Asia. The small nation shares borders with China in the north and with India in the south, east, and west. Located between China and India, it stretches approximately 38,000 square kilometres. Forest land covers about 70% of the country and acts as a natural carbon sink , capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. 2017 statistics show that Bhutan generates 2.2 million tons of CO2, but large tracts of Bhutan’s forests have the potential to sequester nearly three times that amount.
