Climate Change Performance Index: Check India’s rank; Renewable energy remains a challenge

With focus turned to Climate Change in the wake of the recent Glasgow summit, another significant report titled ‘Climate Change Performance Index’ has been released which ranks countries on the basis of their performance to abate climate change.

The report compiled by Germanwatch significantly left the top 3 spots in the ranking vacant as no country had performed well enough to qualify for the top three ranks. India in the list of a total of 60 countries was ranked on 10th spot with a cumulative score of about 69.22, the Indian Express reported.

India managed to grab a rank in the top 10 by dint of high performance in most areas except that in renewable energy category. In the renewable energy category India has been termed a medium level performer. The report remarked that India was benefiting from its relatively low per-capita emissions. While India is a major emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, its per capita emission of the same is extremely low due to a large portion of the 130 crore population being poor.

Who got the top ranks in the Climate Change Performance Index?
As highlighted above no country qualified to be eligible for ranks one to three and the top three spots remained vacant. The top performers in the list of 60 countries were Denmark(rank 4), Sweden(rank 5) and Norway(rank 6). In addition to the Scandinavian group of countries perched on the top, the United Kingdom and Morocco grabbed the 7th and 8th rank in the table.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions List
An accompanying report was released which ranked 60 countries on their performance to lower greenhouse emissions. India remained the same at 10th position even in this list on account of efforts being made to lower its greenhouse emissions with a total score of 31.42. The top three spots remained vacant even on this list as no country did enough to lower its greenhouse gas emissions to qualify for the top three spots. The United Kingdom(rank 4), Sweden(rank 5), Mexico(32.85) grabbed the top rankings on the list.

The report expressed concern over the fact that Australia, South Korea, Russia, the United States along with Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan remained the worst performers on the issue of mitigating climate change. The neighbouring China remained on the 37th rank overall with an overall ‘low’ rating.