New: First round of analysis on climate governance for six countries

Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement will require a step change in emissions reductions efforts and major changes in how the global economy functions. Governments around the world will play a critical role in enabling this transformation through coordinating action from all aspects of society and the economy towards this common goal.

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) is proud to launch a new set of analyses under the banner of the Climate Governance Series, expanding on its country assessments to also evaluate the ability and readiness of national governments to drive transformations towards zero emissions societies.

View Climate Governance Series Main Page

“At the CAT, we are very interested in how various aspects of governance of climate policy performs and how improvements can be made. To that end we have developed a framework to help assess a countries’ readiness, from an institutional and governance point of view, to ratchet up climate policy and implement adequate transformational policies on the ground,” said Claire Stockwell of Climate Analytics.

“The objective is to offer a standardised and replicable approach to assess a country’s readiness to decarbonise and, through this, highlight positive developments, identify areas of improvement and establish a common basis to compare climate governance across countries.”

The first round of this series applied this framework to six selected countries: Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa.

“We assessed up to 33 indicators across 10 criteria that we grouped under the umbrella categories of ‘political commitment’, ‘institutional framework’, ‘policy processes’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’ and gave each a score,” said Swithin Lui of the NewClimate Institute.

“We went through this process at the national level and also for key emitting sectors depending on the country. We aggregated the scores for each criteria and category to assign a rating for each. If you look at our analysis you will quickly be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each country. Obviously we hope all nations improve their governance across every aspect, but this analysis should now it make it clearer on where efforts should be focused.”

By releasing the first six country reports, the CAT aims to both generate discussion and elicit feedback on the methodology that the CAT seeks to develop further. For more detail on the series or the methodology click the appropriate link below. Clicking the flag will take you directly to the analysis for each country that is currently available.