Canada barely placed above the bottom five in a ranking of leaders and laggards among 56 rich and emerging economies conducted by the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), JWN Energy reports.
Major polluters India and China, as well as most of the G20, performed better on their current efforts to meet their Paris climate accord commitments and contain climate change than did Canada, the CCPI found. Sweden, Lithuania, Morocco, Norway, and the UK topped the list for climate action. Canada came in just ahead of Russia, the United States, Australia, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
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The CCPI is produced as a collaboration among Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network, based on “input from around 300 energy and climate experts from around the world,” JWN reports. It uses “standardized criteria” to evaluate “the climate protection performance of 56 countries and the EU, responsible together for more than 90% of global GHG emissions.” The criteria consider national emissions (40%), use of renewable energy (20%), energy consumption (20%) and national climate policy as assessed by experts (20%).
“While Canada has significantly upped its game in climate diplomacy,” the CCPI found, “sector-specific decarbonization strategies are still lacking,” as are “more specific strategies to progress on decarbonizing the country’s economy.”
The international collaboration’s conclusions broadly echo those of Canada’s own Commissioner of the Environment, who found in a recent report to Parliament that its governments have since 1992 often talked a good climate game, but continue to this day to delay substantive action.
