A major challenge for humanity today is to articulate a developmental vision that can achieve a reasonable quality of life for the global population of over 7 billion without breaching planetary boundaries. The Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 2010), which externalizes the planetary pressures of economic growth, promotes misguided development models since countries scoring highest on HDI have transgressed multiple planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al. 2018). The question is whether templates of development exist among the fraternity of nations that may be sustainably scaled to the global population. To study this question, we construct a new conceptual framework foregrounding the principles of equity, historic responsibility, and planetary boundaries. We propose a new environmentally-driven measure of human development – called the eHDI – that internalizes the climate and ecological pressures of economic growth. Analysis of the developmental trajectories of countries over the past three decades based on the eHDI reveals profound insights. We identify Panama, Costa Rica, Albania, Sri Lanka, and Georgia as the top examplar models that can provide reasonably high levels of human development to the entire global population with low environmental pressures. However, a conservative extrapolation of current trends indicates that only the Sri Lankan and Costa Rican trajectories may remain (largely) within planetary boundaries by 2050. Our results, therefore, foreground these two countries as the ones that merit the most focus in sustainability policy studies.