CCPI Report: “Background and Methodology”

A study entitled “Background and Methodology” has been released by CCPI (Climate Change Performance Index). Understanding national and international climate policy is challenging since there are so many nations that need to be considered, and each has different baseline stances and interests. Germanwatch created the Climate Change Performance Index to encourage efforts toward an effective international climate policy and to disentangle the complexity of differentiated obligations and maintained and broken pledges (CCPI). The index currently compares 60 nations plus the European Union (EU), which collectively account for more than 92% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The effectiveness of responding to climate change is assessed using standardised criteria, and the outcomes are ranked. When the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015, each nation presented its own mitigation goals, and the international community emphasised the need to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2°C or even 1.5°C. The CCPI assesses how far along each nation is in accomplishing this objective. It is useful to evaluate each country’s climate policy, recent changes, present GHG emission levels, and ability to limit global warming to far below 2°C, as well as the use of renewable energy sources, conventional energy sources, and their 2030 energy efficiency targets.