Ratings

The Climate Change Performance Index 2022 (CCPI-2022), the new edition of the annual report developed by Germanwatch, NewClimate Institute and CAN, updates the climate protection performance of 60 countries and the EU as a whole. The index is designed to increase the transparency of international climate policy and allows us to compare mitigation efforts and progress made by the evaluated countries, which account for 90% of global emissions.

The CCPI-2022 ranking is calculated from each country’s scores in four categories – Climate Policy, GHG Emissions, Energy Use, and Renewable Energy whereby 40% of the total score is based on indicators of GHG emissions and the remaining 60% is divided equally among the three other categories. Depending on the number of points scored, the rating divides countries into 5 groups - countries with very high, high, medium, low, and very low performance.

The main takeaways from the CCPI-2022:

  - The first three positions traditionally remain empty because, according to the results, no country performed well in all index categories to get into a very high performance group.

  - The frontrunner in this year’s CCPI is Denmark, showing particularly good results in the Climate Policy and Renewable Energy categories and pushing the leader of the last three years Sweden to second place. Denmark and Sweden are therefore the most environment friendly EU countries.

  - Other countries down the list in the high performers group are Norway, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Chile, India, and Lithuania. It should be noted that Norway is the first country to receive a very high rating in the "Renewable Energy" category in the history of the rating.

  - Germany rises six spots, managing to move up from the middleperforming group to become one of the high-performing countries in this year's CCPI. Another four EU countries in the group of the best performers are Finland Portugal, France, and Luxembourg.

  - The European Union (EU) as a whole dropped six places into the medium group, receiving average scores in all four categories. The worst performing EU countries from the very low performance group are Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.

  - The representatives of the G20 countries, which account for about 75% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, are scattered in all groups of the ranking with the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and France among the highperforming countries in CCPI-2022. Eleven G20 countries received a low or very low overall rating.

  - Thanks to positive changes in climate policy, the United States has improved its results by 6 positions, but they are still lower than most developed economies which is why the country is in the very low performance group also including Algeria, the Russian Federation, and Australia.

  - The absolute outsiders of the ranking are Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Canada, and Chinese Taipei.
In general, experts stress that «the climate crisis is an existential threat to life on Earth» and greater effort and action are needed from all governments to put the world on a path to keep global warming below 2°C.