World Happiness Report, 2022

In news– The 10th World Happiness Report was released by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) recently.

About World Happiness Report-

It ranks 150 countries (146 in 2022) on factors such as personal sense of well-being, levels of GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption.
The list assigns a score on a scale of 0-10, based on an average of data over a three-year-period.
The report’s measurement of subjective well-being continues to rely on three main well-being indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions (described in the report as positive and negative affect).
Happiness rankings are based on life evaluations as the more stable measure of the quality of people’s lives.
The report uses the term ‘Dystopia’ which is an imaginary country that has the world’s least-happy people, to have a benchmark against which all countries can be favorably compared (no country performs more poorly than Dystopia) in terms of each of the six key variables.
As per the report, Finland is the happiest country in the world for the fifth time.
The top five countries in the list are part of Europe – Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, while the United States held the 16th spot in the happiest countries list.
From the other end, Afghanistan was ranked as the unhappiest nation, followed by Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Botswana, respectively.
India is ranked 136 (jumped three spots from 139 in 2021) and its neighbors – Nepal (84), Bangladesh (94), Pakistan (121), Srilanka (127) and Afghanistan (146).

UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)-

It was set up in 2012 under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General.
It mobilizes global scientific and technological expertise to promote practical solutions for sustainable development, including the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement.
It works closely with United Nations agencies, multilateral financing institutions, the private sector, and civil society.
It is guided by a Leadership Council, which brings together global sustainable development leaders from all regions and all sectors, including civil society, public, and private sectors.
Much of SDSN’s work is led by National or Regional SDSNs, which mobilize knowledge institutions around the SDGs.
The SDG Academy leads the education work of the SDSN.
SDSN Secretariat: Until 2016, the SDSN Secretariat was hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Since July 2016, the SDSN Secretariat and the SDG Academy have been hosted by the SDSN Association, a non-profit organization.
It has offices in New York, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur.