Dr Chirag Dhara, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS delivered a talk at the Prof R Ananthakrishnan Colloquium at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune on 25 February 2025. The talk was titled “Is India a good or bad performer on climate change?”
Abstract of the talk
Climate performance indices are widely used to evaluate national climate action efforts, but significant discrepancies exist among prominent indices such as the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), and Climate Action Tracker (CAT). These divergences have led to contentious public disagreements between governments and index developers in the past.
Divergences stem from methodological choices that reflect different underlying assumptions about climate performance evaluation. In particular, our analysis finds that the extent of emphasis on equity can lead to widely divergent, even contradictory, assessments by indices.
We introduce a conceptual framework to categorise performance indices based on the worldviews/perspective they encode, often unknown even to the index developer. Our results demonstrate that indices sharing similar underlying perspectives tend to produce concordant rankings. We call for an explicit articulation of perspectives encoded in indices based on our framework, and hypothesize that this would enable more constructive resolution of conflicts.