China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters of CO2 and other GHGs. Together they produce almost half of the world’s emissions – the number currently stands at 45%. They must both work assiduously to address these problems, and with as much cooperation as possible.

China actually produces more than twice the emissions of the US, approaching 12 million metric tons per year compared to 5 million or so by the US. But the US still produces emissions at more than twice the level of China on a per-person basis – about 16 tons per person versus 8. (Only a few oil kingdoms, Canada, and Australia produce more by this measure.)

So what’s the status quo? What are the two behemoths – which also have the world’s two largest economies, with the US in first place – doing, and what will they do?

Carbon Neutrality, Sometime in the Future
China’s government has pledged carbon neutrality by 2060. It’s also said its peak emissions will occur sometime before 2030. The US has pledged carbon neutrality by 2050. Its Congress has just passed legislation billed as the most significant in decades, even as it is littered with support of carbon-fuel power generation. Its proposed $369 billion expenditure to address climate change represents less than 2% of the country’s annual GDP.

Both nations’ commitments are deemed unworthy by Climate Action Tracker, a consortium based in Cologne, Germany that focuses on “independent scientific analysis that tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement.”

Specifically, the group places about 40 countries it’s surveyed into four categories: “critically insufficient” (containing Russia and Iran, among others), “highly insufficient” (containing China, India, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, among others), “insufficient” (containing the US, the EU, and Japan, among others), and “almost sufficient” (containing the UK, Norway, and Kenya, among others). None of the countries surveyed is deemed worthy of being “sufficient,” which would mean likely success in meeting the 1.5C degree warming goal outlined in the Paris Agreement.

Toward an Emissions Reduction Challenge (ERC) Index
Within the Climate 4.0 initiative at the Smart Nations Foundation, we’ve created an Emissions Reduction Challenge (ERC) Index, surveying 143 countries based on our foundational Tau Global Research work on IT and socioeconomic development. We’re more optimistic than the Climate Action Tracker, although it’s critical to emphasize that any projections made today may look tragically silly 50 and 100 years from now.

We outline several color-coded tiers, based on a nation’s current emissions output and its perceived ability to address significant change given its socioeconomic conditions and government. The latter aspect is critical –  it raises the concept of Digital Readiness – if a nation does not have the social conditions, enlightened government, and overall societal desire to improve, then progress will not occur. It seems intuitive that open, democratic societies will be the most likely to possess the Digital Readiness needed for real change, the occasional small, heavy-handed experiment such as Singapore notwithstanding.

Our ratings integrate numerous factors into a single, natural logarithm that places them into tiers that each represent a challenge about 2.7X greater than the tier below it. The ratings are nominal, not relative, so smaller nations tend to have smaller challenges. Thus our most optimistic tier, color-coded green, represents the least difficult challenge and includes New Zealand, Costa Rica, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bhutan, and a few others.

Yellow-coded nations, facing moderately difficult challenges, include much of South America, much of Northern Europe, Taiwan, and Tanzania, among others. The red-coded tier, represent very difficult challenges, includes Japan, South Korea, much of Southeast Asia and Europe (including Germany), and some of South America, among others.

We’re in Dire Straits
Then there is the final tier, color-coded purple, representing the most dire challenges. Four of the Big Five emissions producers – China, the US, India, and Russia – are in this tier, along with Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, and others.

The presence of so many very large producers in the purple tier skews the entire world purple, in our view. Perhaps we’re not so optimistic after all.

We Have the Money, But Not the Will
The world’s two largest economies each have vast wealth (in their own ways) to address their emissions challenge, but also lack the political will (in their own ways) to take the drastic action that may be needed to forestall serious global warming.

Anecdotally, we can listen to American consumers scream bloody murder about $5/gallon gasoline, something that causes discomfort but less so than 130-degree summers or 12-month hurricane and wildfire cycles. That both China and the US have pushed out their carbon-neutral goals to decades down the road looks like a game of kicking the can more than a serious, ironclad commitment to do something about the climate-change challenge.

Non-Cooperation Agreement
The US and China are not cooperating with one another very well at the moment. China’s Premier and undisputed leader Xi Jinping seems like more of an ideological nationalist rather than a problem-solver, as many, including The Economist, are fond of pointing out. His recent, belligerent words and actions over Taiwan, as reported in The Asia Times, for example, show a person with his eye on anything but climate change.

Additionally, that mainland China has had a functioning democracy for only 36 years (between the Qing Empire’s fall in 1912 until the Communist takeover in 1948) of an approximate 4,700 years of recorded history doesn’t bode well for optimistic, Jeffersonian Americans. That the US is in the midst of its own, self-inflicted crisis of democracy at the moment reflects Americans’ own internal problems as well.

Even so, the work continues, by likeminded individuals, and individuals in companies, governments, NGOs, and other non-profits worldwide to achieve real change.

ESG is taking some fire, and we think it needs a re-definition. It focuses on companies, and we think it can, and should, also focus on entire nations.

ESG has its roots in the ideas of University of Chicago sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995), credited as one of the first people to use the term social capital, and a key writer on the topic late in his career. ESG is often discussed in tandem with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as both continue to increase their presence in corporate plans, products and services.

The operative word is corporate; ESG programs focus on a company’s commitment to responsible, progressive environmental, social, and governance processes and programs. It’s a squishy term with squishy metrics, as most terms and programs with social sciences are. Its malleability thus leads to inebitable concerns of “greenwashing” and similar criticisms.

Is ESG Deeply Flawed?
In fact, The Economist recently pronounced ESG to be “deeply flawed,” a movement that “won’t save the planet,” and one that should be boiled down solely to measuring GHG emissions. Fair enough – any time this influential, classically liberal British newspaper advocates a stricter oversight of big corporations is a good moment for the world’s people and future.

Applying ESG to Nations
But we at the Smart Nations Foundation advocate something more dramatic – why not develop a ESG index for entire nations, and not just individual companies?

I’m working on such an index as part of my work for the Smart Nations Foundation and its Climate 4.0 initiative. The ESG Index builds on my work over the past decade on the Tau Index (featured last year by Sustainable Brands), which measures relative IT development and readiness among 143 nations in the world.

The Index integrates a number of technology, economic, and societal factors to show how these nations are doing on a relative basis, that is, how well they’re doing given what we might expect. For example, everyone knows that Switzerland is wealthier than, say, the Philippines, and therefore more nominally competitive as a society and business location.

But how well does Switzerland actually perform, given its advantages? How well does it perform versus other highly developed nations? How well does each nation of the world perform, given its current situation?

The index thus identifies developing nations such as Vietnam, Costa Rica, Rwanda, and Georgia as places to consider, while also recognizing the relatively high performance of highly develped nations such as Denmark, Germany, and Japan.

An ESG Index: Our Initial Take
Now, working with my colleagues at the Smart Nations Foundation and a small group of other researchers around the world, we think it’s valid to measure each of the components of ESG as and create a measurable ESG Index, nation-by-nation.

Doing this provides a big picture that shows which countries in all regions and income levels can be expected to make good progress toward addressing climate change (which is, after all the main goal), which countries (including wealthy ones such as China and the United States) need some prodding, and which ones have serious issues that may or may not be able to be addressed effectively.

Our initial take, based on more than 100 data points for each of the 143 companies covered by the Tau Index yields no surprises: Scandinavia and Finland lead the world. Our ranking looks at each nation’s performance per-person, so a smaller nation doesn’t necessarily have an advantage over a larger nation.

The Big Five and The Top 25
That said, Germany, France, the UK, and Japan were the only three nations with populations of at least 50 million people that cracked our Top 25. Also, Germany and Japan were the only nations among the world’s top ten emissions producers that cracked our Top 25.

Among the world’s Big Five emissions producers – which emit 60% of the world’s GHG emissions each year -- China ranks 77th, the United States 32^nd, India 100^th, Russia 108^th, and Japan 20^th.

There are many more insights to be gleaned from this data, and we are continuing to refine it. But this initial take presents an accurate picture of what is happening with respect to the world’s efforts to address climate change and support the notion of ESG.

Author’s Note: We have teamed up with InsightaaS to research and develop a  executive roundtable series on the primacy of networking technology to prepare for, drive, and enable the resiliency and sustainability of the new digital world order in which we all now live. This is a foundation essay for that six-month research hike, with trail-marking breadcrumbs sprinkled in a series of webinar stops along the way, the project capstone the Great Canadian Data Centre Symposium 2022 (GCDC22), scheduled live, in-person Nov. 15-17 at McMaster University Innovation Park, Hamilton, ON.

Digital and IT markets have undergone profound change over the past several years. This period of disruption – with both its attendant opportunities and risks – is far from over. In fact, boards of directors, senior leadership teams, essential stakeholders, inside and outside every organization, are demanding a new vision for Digital Resilience. And while inclusive of cybersecurity, its far bigger, and all-encompassing.

In the past I've joked that any enterprise in any sector that did not have a named Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and a fully engaged DevOps team was already dead and just hadn’t yet got the memo. Well, this is no joke today.

These startling changes hit with a seemingly blink-of-an-eye shift from on-premises data centres to a full panoply hybrid digital infrastructure options that wrap in a full new stack  of colocation and cloud hosting services and business-transforming resources.

We're now in the “digital experience” business.

To fully understand this at a “philosophy-of-business” level, it’s useful to parse the definitional difference between “change” and “transformation” --  particularly in the digitalization sense. Digitization is about change – the change from analog to digital. While as momentous as it may have been (and often still is) Digitalization is about transformation; the sea-change where value shifts from product or service rendered to residing in the data.

My favorite example in understanding this is Tesla: The value of a Tesla automobile lies less in the physical vehicle itself and more in the massive amount of collected data and its analytics. The combined company's market cap value of 1.061 trillion dollars at close of 2021 lies in its data value.

When one buys a Tesla Model S, one is not just purchasing the present-state vehicle itself, but the incremental unit value of that data today, as well as in its future value – a primary reason why Tesla cars retain their resale value. This becomes part of the full customer (user) experience of being a Tesla owner.  

In this way, Tesla embodies the meaning of the digitalization – the digital transformation – of business.

In this manner, digital transformation provides multiple new pathways for the rapid deployment and adoption of compelling new digital-experience applications. All of these require highly elastic, hyperscale workload management (IaaS, PaaS) options across organizations of all types and at all scales who seek real-time delivery of new benefits (to both customers and the business itself), new capabilities, and/or sharply reduced time, lower or more graduated cost structures. The period of the COVID Pandemic proved this to us over and over and over again, without our even much noticing or much remarking on the fact.

Digital transformation also greatly increased the complexity associated with planning for, deploying, securing and managing IT service delivery. As the delivery of services appears to us much like the ducks gliding across the pond, we are not at all aware of the activity of the ducks' webbed feet beneath the small ripples on the surface.

The global pandemic further increased, again, both the scale and velocity of a dramatic decentralization and dispersion of IT, network capabilities, cloud services and its associated management complexity.

Nearly overnight most ‘internal’ users (employee workforces and their management) were forced to access core resources from geographically (including globally) remote locations. Likewise, virtually all interactions in the full supplier-to-core-business-to-customer value chain became completely reliant on network (internet) connectivity, and all that means.

It only took a minute…

Thus, in seemingly real-time, digital transformation happened -- the “Industry 4.0” IoT moment arrived across all economic and social sectors – the true global digital economy – digital world. There will be no going back.

And in this moment, human organizations, business processes, and business and IT staffs, and digital networks (especially so) were and continue to be deeply challenged and stretched to – and often beyond – their breaking points.

In the period of the pandemic, business across all sectors did not just not slow in growth, but, in fact, speeded up, in scale and complexity. Digital telemetry took on a whole new – and exponential – meaning.

Before the pandemic showed any signs of subsiding, wrenching global supply-chain and logistics issues emerged, massively disrupting delivery of IT-related goods. Consequently, the adoption, deployment implementation and integration of mission-critical IT assets and systems needed to augment, enhance or replace existing equipment in order to keep pace the new digital-world requirements have been slowed or stalled out.

Options for cloud services have helped alleviate some of these supply chain pressures, but organizations needing to revamp their full digital infrastructure value chain – all network capability dependent – its autonomous management and associated digital processes remain constrained today.

The human capital equation in a digital world

The so-called "Great Resignation" phenomena in the workforce has further exacerbated these problem, making it difficult to find and hire qualified human resources fast enough to address a whole new set of security, IT operations, software development and a full-stack of myriad related tasks.

Today, many organizations are following two tracks: Executing against urgent, often new demands with extant, available resources, while simultaneously designing a future that enables the alignment of current and new resources into a digital infrastructure continuum -- from end-point  to analytics at the edge to hyperscale cloud. This future state must be capable of supporting business adaptability and agility through a fast-moving, accelerating and unpredictable tomorrow.

Digital resilience means playing both defense and offense

The new vision of Digital Resilience that is a consequence of all these disruptive changes encompasses the ability to seamlessly mine and deliver new business value across the ever-expanding telemetry of a digital world that faces cyber risk and high-availability constraints, and, now, increasingly urgently, “net-zero” carbon/ghg demands.

This reimagining of business resilience includes the capacity to react and adapt to unforeseen (and often unforeseeable) disruption. We have proven that human imagination, innovation and ingenuity can accomplish what the technology can enable.

Resilience isn’t only a protective and defensive posture, but one that includes the capacity for adapting to disruptive, blindingly rapid change.

Digital Resilience is as much about the ability to take greatest advantage of and/or create new competitive opportunities, as it is about withstanding the hurricane-force winds of a sea change.

Where do you believe your organizational boat floats in this sea change? The "new" disaster recovery – or DR -- is Digital Reslience.

It is the new umbrella term for this new, storm-tossed age.

The SEC's proposed rule changes regarding corporate reporting of Scope 1 and 2, and under certain circumstances, Scope 3 greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, strike a middle ground between the view that strong, relentless government regulation is needed to address climate-change and the view that the market should decide everything.

By having companies report their emissions – which in itself will enforce a discipline upon them to document and more closely manage their carbon profile across the scopes – investors and consumers can now witness and compare companies as they achieve progress (or not) with respect to their GHG emissions.

The World's GHG Emissions
Related to this new focus on corporate emissions, research I've been doing for the past couple of years at Tau Global Research addresses total emissions on a national scale. By examining total CO2 emissions by 145 nations of the world, renewable power grids, governmental effectiveness, and local economic conditions, I've derived a formula that measures the relative challenge facing each nation in achieving significant progress in reducing its carbon footprint.

The results so far have not been great. I boil the numbers down to challenges expressed in natural logarithms – so a 1-magnitude difference is 2.7X, two magnitudes is 7.4X, and three magnitudes is about 20X.

Doing this finds that each of the top four emissions producers – China, the US, India, and Russia – face the most dire challenges, each of them facing a challenge that's 20X the difficulty of the least-difficult challenges in the world.

Rounding out the Top 10 emissions producers are Japan, Germany, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Canada, each facing difficult to dire challenges in addressing their national carbon footprints. Other large emissions producers facing dire challenges include Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. Turkey and Australia face difficult challenges as well.

The least-difficult challenges, by the way, are lightly populated nations in Scandinavia and the Baltics, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and a number of small developing nations lacking economies sufficient to contribute significant GHGs.

The Emissions Reduction Challenge Index
These findings, which I call the Emissions Reduction Challenge (ERC) Index, heavily factor a nation's socioeconomic ability to address its challenges. Developing nations, India and Indonesia for example, can have priorities higher than addressing GHG dramatically. Some developed nations such as the United States and Australia may lack the political and societal concern and will to achieve significant progress.

China is well-known as the biggest player of all, responsible for 31% of all the world's GHG emissions, and difficult to pinpoint as to what substantial progress its opaque government truly wishes. Russia is more of a wild card than ever in the present timeframe.

There are some relative bright spots within the overall dark emissions-reduction landscape. The UK and France, for example, face challenges only about 15% the size of the United States. Switzerland has the wealth and apparent discipline to be a green leader, along with Scandinavia and the Baltics.

A group of countries in eastern Europe that includes Croatia and Slovenia. Smaller nations including Iceland and Ireland in Europe, Costa Rica and Uruguay in South America, and Rwanda in Africa are also as green as nations can be at this time.

I look forward to the SEC deciding to implement its proposed new rules and for the world's corporations large and small to monitor and then substantially improve their carbon footprints. Doing so will go a long ways in reducing the national carbon footprints of the countries in which they operate, particularly the United States. I hope to see my ERC Index show consequent improvement as well.

The dynamic growth of mobile communications is driving positive socioeconomic progress throughout the developing world. The most dramatic effects have been seen in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I make these statements by analyzing the work I've been doing for the past decade with Tau Global Research, and I've been heartened to see similar opinions expressed by other people and organizations in recent years.

Indeed, referring to the world as a whole, “mobile is a key enabler of sustainable economic growth and a major contributor to the delivery of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” according to an article posted by the World Economic Forum in 2018, written by Mats Granryd, Director General of the mobile communications association GSMA.

In the article, he goes on to note mobility's ability to connect people in remote areas and deliver health and educational services, information about programs to eliminate hunger, money transfers and other financial services, and even voting rights. Mobile devices have also become invaluable in disaster-response efforts and initiatives to monitor environmental programs of many types, he also points out.

Enter 5G
Nothing has fundamentally changed since 2018, and recent 5G launches throughout the world promise to bring vast new bandwidth and potential to developing nations. Although mobile devices themselves are no more green than any other manufactured product – and their often-quick disposal looks like a big issue – we can hope and work toward creating more highly sustainable socioeconomic progress in developing nations by dint of steadily increasing mobile communications.

My Tau Global Research work over the past decade has created a significant database of diverse technological and socioeconomic metrics for 145 nations throughout the world. I weigh the impact of technology by adjusting absolute progress for local economic conditions and governmental effectiveness. I connect dots between technology and socioeconomic progress when possible, knowing that this is not hard-science research – the social sciences remain an area where vast areas of grey and of opinion rule the day over the precise measurements we can achieve in mathematics, physics, or chemistry.

Cause for Optimism
But the data is strong enough for me to be unabashedly optimistic about mobile's potential in creating a continuingly progressive future for developing nations. Ingrained income disparity, governmental corruption, and ghastly factional violence always threaten to put progress to a hard stop. These problems may indeed not be solved anytime soon, or ever.

Yet mobile development continues, and it outpaces the other categories in the research I've been doing.

For example, when I look at overall rankings of relative progress, in what I call the Tau Index, the nations of Africa do not score highly. Rwanda is an exception, appearing in the world's top 10, driven by recent technological progress in this relatively small nation by its President Paul Kagame, a controversial figure if there ever was one.

The next highest Sub-Saharan African nations in the rankings are South Africa (#30), Indo-African Mauritius (#58), Tanzania (#64), and sparsely populated Namibia (#81).

Mobility's Momentum
But looking solely at mobility creates another picture. Mobile development is one of seven major inputs into the Tau Index, and reflects how quickly relative progress is being made given existing socioeconomic conditions. Countries with already highly developed mobile infrastructure (eg Scandinavian nations, Japan and South Korea) benefit less from this ranking than countries who are now building their infrastructures.

By this metric, Africa soars to the top: the category's top 30 includes 19 Sub-Saharan African nations: Burundi, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, Zimbabwe, Niger, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia, Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana, Madagascar, Sudan, Gambia, Kenya, and Mali.

Are You Looking at LDCs?
These are many of what are known as the least-developed countries (LDCs) in the world, with varying prospects for positive socioeconomic progress. But it's important to note that this metric does not favor Africa exclusively; other leaders are found in developing Asia and Latin America.

There should be some optimism in these countries by organizations and individuals looking to explore and invest in developing nations. There are many other IT-centric metrics in my research, including datacenter infrastructure, Internet access and speed, and governmental attitudes toward tech in general. I welcome any and all discussions and interest in these topics and the nations that, perhaps surprisingly, are achieving progress in the face of tremendous obstacles.

I think of HAL 9000's implacable red eye staring relentlessly, tirelessly at the activities of the Discovery One's unfortunate crew in Arthur Clarke's novel and Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also think of the Eye of Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien's earlier Hobbit creations.

This is how I imagine the Earth: all-knowing yet impassive, and effectively eternal, regarding us in a dour, saturnine fashion as we flippantly gallivant our way to destruction. Ultimately, the Earth will do us in without a conscious thought if we manage to disrupt its environment sufficiently.

These dark thoughts cross my mind as the COP26 climate-abatement meeting in Glasgow wraps up today, a couple of weeks after a G20 meeting that also focused on climate change finished in Rome.

Late-Breaking Developments in Glasgow
The most current development shows France joining in with The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance to prevent future oil-drilling permits and eventually stop the production of oil and natural gas altogether. The US state of California and UK's country of Wales joined this announcement.

Other pronouncements came out of Glasgow, including a late-hour agreement between the United States and China – the world's top two greenhouse-gas emitters – that promised “enhanced” climate-abatement action and the prospect of an imminent virtual meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, current United Nations Secretary-General, Portugal's António Guterres, told Glasgow attendees that either “we stop (climate change), or it will stop us” and warned that “we're digging our own graves” if humans collectively don't act more quickly and aggressively.

Can We Hit Our Numbers?
Guterres wants a 45% cut in CO2 emissions by 2030 and net carbon-zero emissions by 2050. This is in line with the Biden Administration's recent announced goal of 50-52% reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2050. If meeting these goals worldwide will do the trick, then score one for homo sapiens.

But the US and EU (with similar goals) account for about 16% of the world's emissions. Here's hoping that the new US-China talks yield substantial progress and help bring all of the world's major polluters on board.

I'm listening to the piano music of Francis Poulenc in my headphones as I write this. It's light and witty, elegantly crafted and maintains a steady, optimistic pulse throughout. I should probably be listening to something dark, heavy, and foreboding like the finale from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. Maybe I will later.

I like this sort of music and cultural stuff related to it. I'd like it to persevere a few more centuries, at minimum. Even for those who are not fans of Poulenc or Wagner, I'd wager that everyone has something they'd like to last for awhile, not only during their lifetimes, but well beyond. So I head into this weekend with some optimism in mind, and hope for the world's climate-abatement future.

I do this knowing that the eyes of HAL and Sauron remain fixed upon us, perpetually glaring.

The governments of China and India have made their moves regarding the COP26 climate-change abatement conference, which opens in Glasgow on Sunday, October 31.

Xi Jinping, Video Star
China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has announced he will deliver remarks by video. His expected no-show in real life at Glasgow have already been criticized by US President Joe Biden's administration.

China's government has said that 2030 will be its peak year for emissions, and that it will reach carbon-neutral by 2060. Its commitments have been called “hedging” by at least one analyst. Certainly a policy of can-kicking by the world's largest emitter of greenhouse cases – mounting to 30% of the world's annual total and more than twice the level of the US – does not bring warmth to any hearts.

Modi, Live
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in Glasgow, albeit to deliver messages even more lackluster than China's. In recent remarks on the topic, a government official from the world's number three emitter said reaching net-zero is not the solution. A more useful path is to focus on the total amount of emissions put in the air historically, he said.

Biden and Gang
Regarding the world's number two emitter, the United States, President Biden and an entourage are already on the way to Scotland. The US government has previously pledged to cut its emissions by about half by 2030. The Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based NGO that has advocated for environmental protection issues since 1967, has said this goal is achievable.

The Biden Administration further announced in April that it plans to see zero carbon-based emissions from US electricity generation by 2035, and a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

Vlad and Others
President Vlad Putin from Russia, the world's number four emitter, reportedly has no plans to be at COP26, in person or virtually. He has previously committed Russia to a net-zero economy by 2060.

I've previously, recently written about the big CO2 emitters. I've also written about some other large countries that could exert moral leadership and significant actual leadership, at COP26, and beyond.

The Green Group
According to research at our parent organization, the Smart Nations Foundation, we've identified nearly 40 smaller nations who have minimal challenges in addressing their emissions.

They are color-coded into the Green Group in our rankings. Despite their small geopolitical footprints, in our opinion they should definitely speak up at an event like COP26, which is expected to draw as many as 25,000 people.

This group includes nations in Scandinavia, the Baltic region, the Balkans, and a few smaller nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

22nd-Century People are Already Here
There are already 250 million people on Earth born with the past three years who are expected to be alive in the year 2100. This number is equal to almost 75% of the entire population of the United States. An additional 70 million will be added next year, and increase after that.

The climate-change abatement problem is thus very real. Many readers will have children or grandchildren around today who will be here in 2100. We no doubt hope they will look back at us in that year and be glad that we addressed and fixed the problem.

There's a well-known fantastical element to much great Spanish Latin America literature and art, and one could regard fantastical aspirations such as creating a new EU as being in line with such a worldview.

The reality is somewhat different. Our research has consistently found Latin America to lag the other developing regions of the world over the past 10 years. Mexico, for example, ranks 118^thout of 144 nations in our core rankings of technological and socioeconomic dynamism. Other nations in the region in our lowest tier of performance include Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. A second group of nations that includes Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina fare better, but none of these make the top 50% of performers in the world.

And yet the region remains an attractive, potentially lucrative place, as I discussed my previous article. Spanish Latin America's three top performers mentioned previously – Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile – indeed do very well, although even they are exceeded in other developing regions of the world by top performers such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Rwanda, Senegal, Morocco, and South Africa.

That said, our research is not meant to be a competition nor to be critical of any country's present situation. There is optimism in Spanish World and throughout Latin America. And another key in looking at our research is to find those nations that could most benefit from renewed investment programs, and in modern times, creating a path to a sustainable economy. The lack of current, dirty infrastructure (eg, fossil-fuel energy) can be an advantage when building out new, renewable energy plants.

The Star Performers
One of our data sets contains mathematical third derivatives of development data to deliver a snapshot of immediate change, ie, which nations are on the rise right now as we sit here, and which could therefore benefit the most from investments in sustainability? In Spanish World, that data set shows El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador joining Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile as places in which investors should take an immediate interest.

The large geographical spread of Latin America's Spanish World and a complex, diverse conquistador and immigration history of the region over the past 500 years work against a single leader emerging. Argentina views itself as a European country, the Andean/Asian nations of Peru and Bolivia consider themselves unique, while Colombia, Mexico, and many others pride themselves on their homegrown mestizo cultures. Each nation views itself as special in its own way, with its own Spanish accent and culture.

Corruption and Disparity
The region has a reputation in most American eyes for income disparity and corruption. This holds true for some of the nations, but there is a large range throughout Spanish World and Latin America. Chile and Uruguay are considered by Transparency Internationalto have corruption levels just slightly worse than that of the United States, while Costa Rica, Uruguay, and even El Salvador have less income disparity than the US. That noted, one or both of these two negative factors do continue to impede progress in many of the smaller nations in the region (including Puerto Rico), as well as large ones including Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Mexico.

Where Oh Where to Locate?
As stated above, I've found San Juan to be a convenient and appropriate place to center our Spanish World activities. Its best coffee brands are my favorites (along with an obscure brand from the Philippines) in the world. As part of the US, it provides passport-free travel from the mainland, yet there is a palpable immersion into a clearly Spanish nation the instant one steps off the plane. Hanging out in some of tropical San Juan's restaurant districts on weekend nights is among the finer pleasures one can experience.

Outside of the US, one could make an argument for almost any major city in the region as a good place to locate. None of these arguments recognizes the enormous reality of Brazil, Latin America's largest nation in area and population by far, yet separated noticeably by its Portuguese rather than Spanish settlement history. Despite a high degree of what language experts call “lexical similarity,” the two languages are not really mutually intelligible when spoken. Brazil stands outside Spanish World in its own, separate, Latin American world.

So, although it may seem encouraging to some for Mexico to try to assert itself throughout all of Spanish World, the reality is Latin America, both its Spanish nations and its other nations, remains a place that requires deep focus on particular countries for large investments. In my case, I would love to wake up tomorrow fully fluent in Spanish, and it does behoove me to work harder on improving my skills, but even fluency won't lend itself to centralizing a view of Spanish World as a single, large market.

We see the least difficult paths to sustainability to be offered by Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico, with more difficult challenges in Chile and Colombia, and the most difficult in Mexico. We have very specific data outlining the magnitude of the sustainability challenges in these nations, as well as for the rest of the nations in the region.

The Spanish language originates in the ashes of the Roman Empire, and today is the primary language of most of South and Central America, some of the Caribbean, Mexico, and about 10% of the United States. This constitutes what I call Spanish World, a rich, culturally deep place of which I have very little knowledge.

I remain a beginning-level Spanish speaker, and doubt my ability to improve significantly. This is not a problem per se in San Juan, as this piece of the United States features plenty of English, written and spoken. But my lack of fluency does inhibit my ability to understand Spanish World and all the nuance and depth to its people, culture, and society.

Puerto Rico as Launching Pad
Yet my ongoing work at Tau Global Research includes all of the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas. I have an office in San Juan, Puerto Rico that gives me some real-world perspective of living and doing business in Spanish-inflected culture. San Juan not only provides easy connections to the mainland US but also to Panama City, Panama; Bogota, Colombia; and to Madrid, Spain. It functions as well as any place as a Latin American headquarters, at least for a small business such as mine.

We cover 27 Latin American countries in our research (out of 144 total for the world) – there are 18 Spanish-speaking countries among them. The leaders in terms of technological and socioeconomic dynamism are Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile. Among the larger countries in this group, Colombia emerges as a leader.

Where Does Mexico Fit In?
One eternal large issue in any discussion of Spanish World is whether Mexico should be viewed as a/the regional leader, or whether it constitutes a world apart from the rest of the region (and vice versa). Discussions I've had on this topic for the past 40 years with people leads me to believe the latter. Mexico has a distinct history and popular culture, and is geographically removed enough from the rest of the region as to be its own world.

To be sure, an element of Mexico's political leadership continues to strive for regional leadership. A recent meeting in Mexico City of an organization called (in English) the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (rendered as CELAC in its Spanish acronym) made waves as “Mexico has signaled that it wants a leadership role in Latin America after years of focusing almost exclusively on its bilateral relationship with the U.S.”

There was also talk of de-emphasizing the role of the Organization of American States (OAS), a long-existing NGO headquartered in Washington, DC that's viewed more as a booster for US policy than for pan-regional cooperation. CELAC, in contrast, does not include the US among its 32 members, is headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, and for what it's worth, takes in non-Spanish countries in the region as well.

CELAC was once headed by the vitriolic Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, is currently at odds with Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and is not an organization designed to be effective with optimizing regional relations with the United States.

A LatAm EU?
Mexico's current assertiveness within CELAC also embraces a reported vision to create a region “similar to the EU.” The Spanish World component of CELAC membership comprises 350 million people (compared to 450 million the EU) and a combined economy of $3.5 trillion (compared to $15 trillion for the EU).

Certainly the country should participate in regional discussions and initiatives; but I can't see the validity of locating a headquarters for all of Latin America in Mexico City, in the way companies do in, say, Paris for Europe or Singapore for Southeast Asia. It just doesn't feel right.

Some of the reason is geography. It's a 9-hour flight from Mexico City to Buenos Aires or Santiago, for example, compared to the 2-4 hours for Paris in Europe and Singapore in SE Asia. Mexico also has its own, very intense local issues, not the least of which is its unique, rocky relationship with the United States.

Historically, the US has been up to all sorts of nefarious business from San Juan to Santiago to Caracas and elsewhere, but even more so in Mexico. Its war with its southern neighbor in the 1830s set modern borders that remain a point of angry contention in Mexico, and the modern-day political football of immigration polarizes US politics, creates an unfortunate overlordish relationship with the two governments, and continually reveals tensions that simply must be resolved if Mexico and the US are ever to have relations that can be considered “normal.” NAFTA and its recent successor don't come close to achieving this.

I just returned from four lovely days in San Diego, attending the Sustainable Brands '21 (SB21) (www.sustainablebrands.com) conference.

I appeared on a panel that was focused on the potential ROI of sustainable, regenerative business practices. My role was to take a high-level view of nations and regions as a whole, as places to do business based on their technological and socioeconomic conditions and progress.

Sustainable Brands in San Diego
SB21 brought together around 600 to 700 sustainability practitioners and analysts within the large corporate world. Present in force were such major companies as Nestle, Hershey's, PepsiCo, Patagonia, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Tetra Pak, Amazon, Gulf Oil, Visa, MasterCard, and AT&T.

Sessions and informal discussions were rich with talk of Paris 2015, the UN's SDGs, CSR programs morphing into the corporate mainstream, a note by one speaker that Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book “Silent Spring” is now almost 60 years old, and the upcoming COP26 conference in Glasgow.

COP26 in Glasgow
The Glasgow conference (October 31-November 12) will be a nicely twinned event with SB21. It's much larger, of course, with an expected 20,000 to 25,000 attendees, including the heads of dozens of countries. US President Joe Biden is expected to attend, along with several cabinet members and Biden's special climate-change leader, former Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry.

COP26 was developed as an annual event in the 90s under the auspices of the United Nations. It was not held in 2020 because of Covid-19 concerns. As with SB21, it has corporate support. But where the big companies are a focus of SB21 and presented their best environmental faces and behavior there, the completely separate group of corporations who have financially gotten behind a government- and UN-driven event like COP26 have found their roles to be more ambivalent and controversial.

A few of COP26's corporate sponors have complained that their needs are not being fully meet by COP26 so far. (I note here that none of SB21's sponsors are in the COP26 sponsorship group, a UK- and Euro-heavy group that includes Sky,Hitachi, National Grid, Scottish Power, SSE, GSK, NatWest, Reckitt, Sainsbury’s, Unilever and the US company Microsoft.)

Prominent Attendees
COP26 will likely not feature Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vlad Putin, head of the world's #1 and #4 greenhouse gas (GHG) producers. In addition to Biden from #2 producer US, COP26's attendees will include #3 producer India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The world's other Top 10 GHG producers are taking various approaches to COP26:

• Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Moon Jae-In plan to attend and may meet privately there as well
• Saudi Arabia ruling family has issued proclamations about its future as an oil producer, with no official word on who might attend
• Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to attend.
• Germany is expected to send top environmental officials as its newly elected government continues to get sorted out.
• Iranian President Ebraham Raisi's possible attendance is shrouded in some controversy at the moment.
  
  The Top 10 producers emit about 70% of the world's total GHG emissions.

Emissions Reduction in Developing Nations
In addition to some sponsor griping, there is the more important issue of many countries apparently trying to tilt COP26 findings their way. Specifically, according to a BBC report, several nations (not including the United States, China, or Russia) object to certain language about the fossil-fuel industry and about funding lesser-developed nations in their emissions-reductions efforts.

The BBC report stems from a leak of 32,000 messages from COP26-related governments. One can imagine that a daily push-and-pull about issues large and small is an integral part of the accepted process of making COP26 policy.

That said, any remarks about supporting lesser-developed nations is concerning to me and my work with Climate 4.0 and the Smart Nations Foundation.

The least-developed countries (LDCs, a common term used by economists and investors) of the world produce only about 1.3% of the world's emissions, yet are home to about 15% of the world's population, more than 1.1 billion souls. Our research indicates a sustainable electricity grid providing enough power to improve their economies significantly would cost around $300 billion, an investment equal to about 0.4% of the combined G20 economies of the world.

Progress Amid Criticism
Whereas one could feel a tangible, palpable sense of activity and progress amongst the modest attendance of SB21, with plenty of inspiring stories and hopeful messages, the COP series often comes under criticism for being yet another big talk/no action event.

A recent criticism was leveled by the noted Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who spoke of “empty words and promises.”Separately, Greta Thunberg recently wrote a piece in which she says there are no real climate leadersamong the governments of the world. (Coincidentally, another recent article from the source of Greta's quote contains a detailed analysis of COP26 and its goals.)

So, the long, very difficult, messy business of adjusting human behavior to meet the existential challenges of emissions reduction and climate-change abatement continues. “Regenerative” and “circularity” have joined the mainstream list of terms that's previously braced “environmentalism,” “green,” and “sustainability.”

SB21 provided one example of a large group of people and enterprises at work on the issues; COP26 will provide another. It's easier to criticize than to achieve progress, and also maddening to see people and governments logrolling and “greenwashing” rather than embracing substantial efforts to achieve significant change.

In my previous post, I discussed the large nations of Europe and the imperative for their leadership in global efforts at climate-change abatement and creating sustainable economies.

I have a little more context to that discussion: I ran a little twitter poll recently asking people to vote on which European country will be the most consequential – not necessarily the largest – within 30 years. I provided four choices: Germany, France, Sweden, and Russia.

All countries received votes, with Germany receiving the most.

I listed Germany and France because they are the two largest EU nations, and were the driving forces behind creation of the EU, the Schengen visa zone, and the Euro, all initiatives meant to unify as much of Europe as possible to the degree possible. As I noted in my previous post, France is emerging as a sustainability leader while Germany has a lot of work to do.

I listed Sweden because of its potential role as an arbiter and exerter of moral leadership. Certainly, the Scandinavians enjoy their role in exerting so-called soft leadership, even though the region's four countries have a combined population of about 20 million people.

Big Trouble in Big Russia
I listed Russia because of its status as both a European and Asian country. Russia is the fourth-largest CO2 emitter in the world, and spews out 80% of the per-person emissions of the US, with an economy less than 20% of its per-person size. The nation's leadership has shown little inclination to address its emissions-reduction challenge, which is among the most dire on the planet.

Russia remains a powerful, dangerous country, one sophisticated enough to have meddled successfully with the US political process and EU dialogs as well. Its tremendous, deep culture remains in contrast with its melancholy history of trying to integrate with the European elite politically and be treated as an equal partner.

In China and India, Too
Discussion of Russia must  lead to discussion of the world's other large CO2 producers. The world's three largest CO2 emitters are certainly aware of the situation. In fact, China (at more than twice the level of the US), the US, and India (at a rate about that of the EU) make claims about their activities in these areas.

China and the US, for example, each made what they believed to be major announcements during the recent Climate Week NYC, held during a General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.

Yet China finishes dead last in our rankings of the emissions-reduction challenges facing the nations of the world, with a still-coal-fired economy that emits more than 30% of the world's entire emissions, and an opaque government that does not appear to be open to much cooperation, collaboration, or even substantial change as far as it will tell anyone.

India finished second to last; as the world's third-highest producer, with continued Heraklean efforts to lift its 1.4 billion-person nation to developed status, we've estimated it will take almost half a trillion US dollars simply to generate enough electricity to bring India up to 40% of the developed-world level. This amount does not include all the infrastructure and consequences of a growing economy that would come with such a vast increase in power generation.

And the USA
Hey, don't be sniggering in the corner over there if you're in the United States. The US faces the world's fourth-most dire challenge (ahead of only China, India, and Nigeria), as it grapples with one of the highest per-capita emissions rate in the world and a political climate in which at least 35% of its population and 46% of its Congress is opposed to environmental programs of any kind.

The remaining large nations in the rogues' gallery facing the world's most dire challenges include Russia, Mexico, Angola, Brazil, Congo and South Africa, Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan.

We.Must.Act
Collectively, the 14 nations listed here produce two-thirds of the world's CO2 and related emissions. Any one of the nations facing a dire challenge is worthy of a lengthy, serious analysis of their situation and what sort of mammoth, sustained effort it would take to put them on a sound path to sustainability and a circular economy.

The individual challenges facing each of them can appear intractable. As always, Mother Nature doesn't worry about such particulars. We must, collectively as human beings, make these challenges tractable.

Moral leadership from small countries such as Sweden can only go so far. Without serious, sustained dialog among designated, influential experts from the US, China, India, and Russia, there is little hope for the future. What can organizations such as the Smart Nations Foundation, and any organizations in  which you participate, help develop and drive this dialog?

Europe's five largest countries – Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain – have a combined population about equal to that of the United States. They have a combined GDP about two-thirds the size of the US. Yet produce less than half the CO2 and related emissions of the US every year.

The 26-nation European Union (which no longer includes the UK) produces about 60% of the US total, and has reduced its overall emissions almost 40% from its peak 40 years ago.

The other largest countries by population – China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Russia – are all heavy CO2 emitters, with dire emissions-reduction challenges facing them.

So the world must look to Europe for global leadership in emissions reduction, climate-change progressivism, and creating sustainable economies that should become more circular every day.

Big Meetings this Month
An upcoming G20 meeting in Rome and climate meeting, COP26 in Glasgow, put the focus on the Old World and its efforts to bend its economies toward a circular shape. The Glasgow meeting in particular has several key goals, including to “keep the 1.5C degrees (rise in overall temperatures) within reach,” and to “mobilize finance.”

The latter goals refers to a section of the Paris Agreement of 2015 calling for US$100 billion in climate-change abatement investment annually. The world is falling short of that, according to the World Resources Institute. In any case, our research has shown a need for at least $500 billion (total) to bring the developing world up to speed economically while staying on a sustainable path.

The Emissions-Reduction Challenge Index
Within our ongoing research at Tau Global Research, we've developed what we call the Emissions Reduction Challenge (ERC) Index, which integrates basic data about emissions with a complex ranking of socioeconomic development to determine the size of the challenge – the odds of achieving success, if you will – facing 144 nations of the world.

We're able to express the challenge in a single number that represents a natural logarithm. This in turn allows one to understand the relative difficulty – and often, enormity – of the challenge each nation faces. We've placed the 144 nations into four color-coded zones – green, yellow, red, and purple for those most dire challenges listed above.

The green zone has 38 nations, most of them small. The largest, and coincidentally greenest, is Rwanda and its 12 to 13 million people. That aside, there are 20 European countries in the green zone, including the Baltic Nations, much of former Yugoslavia, other former Soviet satellites, Malta, and all of Scandinavia. Switzerland and Ireland make the cut as well.

There is a unique story behind each of these 20 nations. Many of them remain relatively underdeveloped economically, so face the challenge of developing first-rank economies while pursuing sustainable power and all that goes with it. The more highly developed nations face the challenge of continuing on their path, exerting world leadership despite their relatively small size, and in the case of Norway, of eliminating oil exports that are not helpful to other nations when it comes to sustainability.

Europe has 13 of the 48 countries in our next level, the yellow zone of nations that face moderate challenges in driving towards sustainability. This group has a large number of African and other developing nations that currently do not emit much in the way of greenhouse gases, but must be supported by worldwide investors to build their economies in a sustainable way.

A Few Large Leaders
There are also several large European nations in this group: the UK, France, Romania, the Netherlands and Belgium. These nations have the opportunity to exert moral and tangible leadership, as they all emit significant amounts of CO2 and have a mixed record so far of developing renewable energy. The UK has migrated 28% of its electricity grid to renewable, giving Ancient Albion a leg up on emerging as a European leader (whether or not it's part of the EU).

Our research shows that most of Europe is focused on sustainability, including the sometimes languorous Italy, host of the upcoming G20 meeting cited above. Several political parties are trying to establish La Bella as a world sustainability leader. Longshot bettors should examine the country more closely, to see if it can someday emerge along the present-day lines of the UK, France, and Netherlands/Belgium.

* France's focus on nuclear energy over the past four decades has played a large role in giving it a carbon footprint about half the size of Germany's on a per-person basis, and one-third the size of the US's carbon footprint. The French mindset, focused on their language reclaiming its status as the world's lingua francaof diplomacy and other important discussions, is no doubt pleased with the country's role as a leader in sustainability. But nuclear does not equal renewable and sustainable, and France finds itself with 18% renewable energy generation at the moment, compared to the 28% of the UK cited above.

* The Netherlands and Belgium expand this emerging greenbelt from the UK to France and into the Low Countries. They both actually emit a high level of greenhouse gases, comparable to Germany on a per-person basis, but our data shows the two nations are also on a vector of technological and socioeconomic dynamism that equips them well for addressing their respective challenges. This is particularly heartening for Belgium, with so much of EU activity centered in its capital Brussels.

* Romania's relatively moderate challenge is partially a result from its years of economic torpor under Communism and the particularly egregious dictator Ceaușescu. But the country has made significant economic progress in recent years, and is a solid member of the top rank of nations in our Tau Index research of dynamic countries. Its neighbor, the smaller Bulgaria, has achieved similar progress and is also in the yellow zone of ERC Index nations.

* Germany must assuredly step up its sustainability game, as it currently resides in our “red zone” of very difficult challenges. Germany remains a large coal producer and consumer, and despite hard pulls from its political left to get the country fully on the sustainable track, this remains a highly federated, politically complex nation. The French may get some schadenfreude from watching its neighbor struggle, but yet, there's nothing wholly funny about the battle against climate change.

I ran three little polls on my twitter account last week, seeking people's opinion as to what will be the most consequential country 30 years from now – in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the world. By “consequential,” I don't necessarily mean “largest.”

The polls were not meant to seek – or capable of seeking -  rigorous, statistical valid results. But I got some valuable responses, and some private input from a few people, enough to help me make some observations.

I'll focus on the African poll at the moment.

For Africa, I listed four places – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Kenya/Tanzania, and South Africa. Each of the four got votes, with Nigeria coming out on top, and each had backing in input I received from colleagues.

Below is how I see the case for consequentiality for each of the four. I am viewing them through the lens of climate change and ability to create a sustainable economy, because without clear progress toward emissions reduction and a sustainable economy, no country will be able to assert consequential leadership in the coming decades.

Nigeria. Western Africa's heavyweight caught and then surpassed South Africa as the continent's biggest economy some time ago. Its per-person (per capita) wealth is still less than half of South Africa's, but its overall economy now exceeds $500 billion annually, putting Nigeria easily into the Top 30 economies of the world. Nigeria is the most populous African nation, and is now one of only seven countries in the world with more than 200 million people.

As far as emissions goes, Nigeria produces only 2% of the total of the United States, and only 20% of its closest population peer, Brazil. But less than 20% of its electricity generation is renewable at the moment, and its ongoing socioeconomic malaise results in the country facing one of the ten most difficult paths to sustainability in the world, according to our research at Tau Global Research.

Nigeria's Eko Atlantic project places it among a small group of countries that's trying to build an ambitious megacity from scratch, in an effort to attract more capital, visitors, and overall interest in what the nation has to offer. But this nation will have to eliminate its economic dependence on oil exports and reputation for inequity and corruption internally if it is to address its sustainability challenge and emerge as Africa's most consequential country some day.

Dem. Rep. of Congo. This most tragic of nations, now also simply called “Congo,” is named after the colossal river that passes through much of it. The country has historically shared the Congo name with a much smaller country just north of it; both countries were colonized by French-speaking countries, but maintain separate identities to this day.

Congo remains one of the richest areas in the world in terms of natural resources, in the same league as the giants Russia, China, Canada, the United States, Brazil, and Australia. Its wealth in commodities has led to its brutal exploitation over the past 140 years or so, first by a Belgian king, then the Belgian nation in cahoots with large companies, and more recently by anyone who can invest in it and extract from it. A series of murderous civil and regional wars in the past 30 years have made it almost impossible to function to any sort of norm.

Africa's largest country in area, Congo encompasses more than 900,000 square miles, making it larger than Mexico and 75% the size of India. Its population of around 90 million people places it in the world's top 20. Its criminally low income of around $600 per person annually places its overall economy around 90^th in the world, comparable to much smaller Serbia or Uruguay.

Yet the Congolese have created a vibrant culture that they export wherever they go, whether in Europe, China, or elsewhere. There is a nominal democracy in place at the moment, built around a new Constitution created in 2006, with a president, prime minister, and bicameral legislature. Although Congo remains near the bottom of our Tau Index research in terms of dynamism, its minuscule CO2 footprint (only 5% of Nigeria which is itself only 2% of the US) brings hope that it could possibly, maybe, perhaps, somehow emerge as a sustainable leader 30 years down the road.

Congo remains the great hope to emerge as the real-world Wakanda, a place that could serve as the great Central African rival to Nigeria a few hundred miles to its northeast.

Kenya/Tanzania. I lumped these two neighbors together in my poll, because they are often viewed as a strategic pair of nations due to their physical proximity, even as they differ substantially in other ways.

Kenya emerged in the 1960s as a beacon of hope for Africa. It fell into decline and now has re-emerged as a place of interest to investors and other developers. It ranked at the top of African nations in our Tau Index research in 2017, although its momentum has slowed from its peak.

Tanzania has often been described to me as more entrepreneurial than Kenya. This is meant as a compliment, not as some ironic reference to corruption. Its population of 60 million is slightly larger than its neighbor's 54 million. Its socioeconomic progress as measured by our Tau Index places it slightly ahead of Kenya at the moment, and among the leaders (along with neighboring Rwanda) among the 22 least-developed nations (LDCs) that we measure.

Tanzania's economy is actually significantly smaller than its neighbor's, with an average income of $1,100 resulting in a GDP of about $60 billion; compare this to $2,100 and about $110 billion in Kenya.

Both nations seem highly invested in the East African Community (EAC) and its ultimate vision of creating a large, unified East African nation. (Significantly, Congo is also being considered for membership in the EAC). The EAC was one of the products of the idealistic 1960s, fell onto hard times, and then was revived in the year 2000.

The two nations face differing challenges when it comes to emissions reduction and getting on the road to sustainability. Both have underdeveloped grids at the moment; Kenya is a world leader in renewable energy while Tanzania is less so. Both emit similar amounts of CO2. Tanzania is more dynamic and perceived as slightly less corrupt than Kenya, so has an edge in the difficulty of the challenge it faces in becoming a sustainable leader.

With a combined population similar to that of Congo and half of that of Nigeria, with more dynamic economies, these two nations will be a lot of people's picks to be the most consequential nations in Africa over the next 30 years.

South Africa. Since the abolition of apartheid in the early 1990s, South Africa has lost its place as the continent's largest economy, while working to gain moral leadership on the emerging continent. South Africa has close to 60 million people and a per-person income of about $6,000 annually, a few times higher than the other nations mentioned in this post. It has worked to focus on its technology sector and lessen its economic dependence on diamonds and other mining activities.

South Africa finishes among the Top 40 most dynamic countries in our Tau Index research, in a group that includes India, France, Uruguay, and Morocco. Its hosting of the soccer World Cup in 2010 was the first and only time an African nation has hosted a global event of this caliber. It retains strong military forces; though it has no serious conflicts with other nations, South African forces have been used to try to mediate some of the horrendous violence that's been part of Central and Eastern Africa over the past couple of decades.

South Africa has seen growing inequity and violence in its most recent years. It continues to lead the continent in received foreign direct investment (FDI) with about $150 billion over the years, a few tens of billions ahead of Nigeria.

More importantly, the country is a major CO2 emitter, ranking 14^thin the world, on a par with the big, major countries Turkey, Mexico, and Indonesia. It has very little renewable power and faces a dire emissions reduction challenge, falling into the group facing the world's most difficult challenges.

For South Africa to emerge as the most consequential nation in Africa over the next 30 years will take a much stronger effort toward sustainability and building a more equitable society than it has been able to accomplish in the past several years.

My little poll covered all of Sub-Sahara Africa's major regions: Western Africa (Nigeria), Central Africa (Congo), Eastern Africa (Kenya/Tanzania), and Southern Africa (South Africa). In the end, rather than having a single, central consequential leader, the African continent is so vast that it seems likely that each region will have its own nation or two of high consequence.