Archive for November, 2009

The 5th International Gross National Happiness Conference in Foz de Igusau, Brazil is off to a great start. They expected 350 participants and they had to turn away registrations when they had more than 800. Dr. Susan Andrews, organizer of the conference began the day with a long presentation  as part of the concluding session of a National Conference on citizen efforts to preserve good water quality. This was followed by a very clear keynote address by the Prime Minister of Bhutan. Day 2 saw the real start of the working conference with presentations about on-going projects in Canada, Bhutan and Brazil. Professor Eric Zencey, from Montpelier, Vermont gave a presentation on on GDP-GNH.

Linda Wheatley, Tom Barefoot, Eric Zencey and Marie Hamilton are representing GNHUSA at the conference.  A very well developed effort to implement GNH at the town level is underway in Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. They have refined a questionaire and accumulated sufficient statistics to learn how the Happiness Indicators are working and what are some of the local needs that are illuminated as detracting from happiness. We also saw very impressive commitments to the application of GNH principles inside and outside corporations by Natura, Brazil’s largest cosmetics company and Comig, a large electricity supplier.

We will post details of the presentations when they become available.