The forum's first full "environmental sustainability index", published over the weekend, is one of the first to classify 122 countries according to their ability to protect the environment while promoting economic growth. With the exception of Belgium, all the industrialised countries are in the top half of the rankings, with the United States in tenth place and Britain sixteenth.

The New Economics Foundation pointed out that they were in the bottom half of a list of 134 countries ranked according to their carbon dioxide emissions, a key component of global warming.

"The US consumes so many finite natural resources that you could fit the whole of China, India, the Russian Federation and Brazil into its ecological footprint and still have room to spare", the foundation added.

Its deputy director, Alex MacGillivray, said: "I've worked on plenty of indexes in my time, but I've never come across such a blatant effort to bury the most important parameter - global warming - in a morass of irrelevant noise. "The forum's index is being presented as a rigorous tool for policymakers."

One of the report's authors, Daniel Esty, who is the director of Yale University's Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, said: "The index represents a first step toward a new approach to pollution control and natural resource management, with the emphasis on data, facts and analytic rigour rather than emotion and rhetoric." However, the forum's study admits that data is scarce, including "shockingly poor country coverage" of environmental indicators, while economic indicators are more readily available at international level.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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