2019 – Posted in: Daily News – Tags: Paris Agreement, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Climate Change Performance Index 2019

For: Preliminary & Mains

Topics covered:

About the Climate Change Performance Index and its key findings
About Paris Agreement

News Flash

The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) tracks countries’ efforts to combat climate change.

As an independent monitoring tool, it aims to enhance transparency in international climate politics and enables a comparison of climate protection efforts and progress made by individual countries.
India, for the first time, ranks among the top 10 in this year’s Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) presented at the COP25 climate summit here. India was ranked 9th in the high category showing that emissions are still comparatively low.

About the Climate Change Performance Index

The new Climate Change Performance Index report assesses the climate programmes of 57 countries and the European Union, which together account for more than 90 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions.
The index is based on a number of criteria, like the country’s energy use, its per capita emissions, its emission reduction targets for 2030, its national and international climate policy, renewable energy deployment and past trends of emissions.
It assigns every country scores on each of these indicators to assess its overall ranking.

Key findings

India receives an overall medium rating in the Renewable Energy category.
India’s 2030 renewable energy target is rated very high for its well-below 2 degree (Celsius) compatibility.
The current levels of per capita emissions and energy use are still comparatively low, and along with ambitious 2030 targets, result in high ratings for the greenhouse gas emissions and energy use categories.
No country performed well enough across all the indicators to deserve a ‘very high performing’ rating and therefore the top three slots were left vacant.
Sweden and Denmark top the rankings at the 4th and 5th positions, followed by Morocco, the UK, Lithuania and India.
China is ranked at the 30th position, while the United States is at the bottom of the rankings.
Global coal consumption has been reducing while a boom in renewable energy continues.
Climate Action Tracker had found India amongst a handful of countries whose climate actions were compatible with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global rise in temperatures to below 2 degree Celsius as compared to pre-industrial levels.

Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, signed in 2016.
The Paris Agreement’s central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Additionally, the agreement aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.
As of November 2019, 195 UNFCCC members have signed the agreement, and 187 have become a party to it.
Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming.

Way ahead

National expert commend the government for strong policies to support the expansion of renewable energy which is needed to meet the ambitious targets as recent renewable energy capacity additions are below the level required.

Source: Indian Express