I hope you enjoyed my previous article about the relationship between Economic Wealth and Climate. In this article, I intend to talk about a related but different concept: Human Development! The reader may think that the richest (wealthiest) countries are ALWAYS the most developed. Despite a strong relationship between the two concepts, these are different. How to measure a Country’s Human Development? To explain Human Development, I will focus on an indicator developed and compiled by the United Nations: the Human Development Index.

When in university in the early 2010’s in Portugal, me and my colleagues would discuss whether all the richest countries had to be the ones with the worse weather. The worse weather for us represented cold temperatures and this vision made sense for us based on a Southern European country and glancing at Northern counterparts, such as Germany or Norway. However, we always kept one country in our mind: Australia!