Global liveability index falls 7-points, as major cities face challenges
Ability to handle crisis, pace with vaccines rollout drove rankings Nigeria’s Lagos in bottom pile New Zealand’s Auckland tops; Syria’s Damascus least liveable
WITH THE EFFECT OF COVID19 pandemic still reverberating across all life’s facets and all societal strata, and calculations still ongoing by analysts, a new survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of 75-year-old The Economist newspaper, on liveability, said the overall global average liveability score has fallen by 7-points in the first quarter of this year (Q1 2021), compared with the average pre-pandemic score.
The survey carried out between February 22 and March 21 this year, assessed “How the Covid-19 pandemic affected liveability worldwide,” looked at the extent to which cities were sheltered by strong border closures, their ability to handle the health crisis and the pace at which they rolled out vaccination campaigns drove significant changes in the rankings.
Auckland, New Zealand’s capital city in the Oceania region, topped other global cities surveyed in the EIU’s liveability rankings, owing to the city’s ability to contain the coronavirus pandemic faster and thus lift restrictions earlier, unlike others around the world.
Also, six of the EIU’s top 10 cities in the March 2021 survey are in New Zealand or Australia where tight border controls have allowed residents to live relatively normal lives.
“The concept of liveability is simple: it assesses which locations around the world provide the best and worst living conditions. Assessing liveability has a broad range of uses, from benchmarking perceptions of development levels to assigning a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. City officials and urban policymakers can use the rankings to benchmark target cities against the top-ranked cities,” the EIU said.
Meanwhile, the survey also found that many European and Canadian cities fell down the rankings, with grimmer pictures, having been battling with a second Covid-19 wave by restricting cultural and sporting events, and closing schools and restaurants.
However, several US cities, including Honolulu and Houston, the biggest gainers in the latest survey, have bounced up the rankings over the past six months as social restrictions have lifted.
On the health scores, the sector fell after the onset of the pandemic in most cities across the world, with the least-affected cities concentrated in western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, the report said.
Damascus, the war harried Syrian capital showed less changes and the city maintained its unenviable status as the world’s least liveable city.
Meanwhile, the lockdowns due to the pandemic have caused huge volatility in bi-annual liveability index, which ranks 140 cities across five areas: stability, healthcare, education, culture and environment
Lagos, Nigeria’s financial and business capital with a red-hot economy of more than $50.83 billion in GDP, which is adjudged bigger than 15 African countries put together, is surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit as having scraped along the bottom end of world’s worst liveable cities.
But the same Nigerian coastal city in the West African region, is home to more than 20 million people, listed number 17th in the UNDP’s world’s 30 largest cities in 2020 – different tales for different folks – one may say.
According to the EIU, Lagos ranks in among the bottom end along with Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, and Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The Nigerian city bustling with more than 20 million people was ranked ninth among the 10 of the least least-liveable cities in the world, topping only Damascus. On the global scale, Lagos was ranked 139 out of 140 globally ranked liveable cities.
The report focused on five broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure to rank the cities. It assigned every city a rating for relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across the categories.
The report said the poorest ranking cities are struggling with growing civil unrest and military conflicts, a major reason for being in the ten of the least.
“These (cities) continue to score poorly across the five categories. A consistently low stability score, owing to ongoing civil unrest and military conflicts, is the reason behind most of these cities featuring in the bottom ten. However, conditions have deteriorated even further as a result of Covid-19— particularly for healthcare,” the Economist newspaper’s EIU survey said.
In Nigeria, while most parts of the country are besieged by military and police activities and civil unrest, Lagos seems to be relatively calmer this year. The last time the city was harried was in October last year, during the EndSARS protests, which enveloped the entire country.
When the army was called in Lagos flowed with blood, as the soldiers shot into protesting young people killing several of them and fatally injuring many others. Till date, the army authorities and a panel set up to investigate the crisis are trading different accusations.