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Most of the G20 members — including countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — need to significantly step up climate action, according to a new report by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a Delhi-based policy research climate think tank.
To analyse countries’ climate efforts and highlight the areas for improvement, CEEW developed an assessment tool called the climate accountability matrix (CAM).
Here is a look at the findings of the report and CAM.
What is CAM?
According to CEEW, CAM is a first-of-its-kind assessment tool from Global South that can examine a country’s performance in climate aspects beyond mitigation including adaptation and means of implementation. The tool evaluated the G20 members on five crucial “themes — international cooperation, national measures, sectoral robustness, enablers, and climate adaptation efforts — and 42 indicators.”
Each indicator carried equal weight and was scored on a range of 0 to 1. These were then aggregated and then ultimately used to arrive at an overall score for each country. The performance was divided into categories: leader (0.90-1), reasonable effort (0.75-0.90), limited effort (0.60-0.75), and needs improvement (0-0.60).
What are the findings of the report?
The report has found that none of the G20 members qualify as leaders as of now. All countries fall between reasonable and limited efforts — India qualifies as reasonable effort.
In Global South, India and South Africa have done the most in terms of climate action by “actively participating in key agreements, undertaking reasonable efforts domestically and adhering to their obligations,” the report said.
While South Africa showcases robust domestic climate governance and climate disclosures, Brazil and India perform relatively better than other developing nations in the renewables segment.
Major fossil fuel-dependent G20 members such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey are in the limited-effort or need-improvement categories across all themes.
Six out of 11 developed countries, including the US and Canada, have shown inconsistent engagement in key climate agreements, and weak ambitions continue to persist.
According to the report, developed economies like the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany have made substantial efforts, especially via international cooperation and creating comprehensive climate governance frameworks.
“However, even the countries making reasonable progress are not on track—they need to improve sectoral robustness and create an enabling environment for ambitious climate actions,” the analysis said.
The report recommended that developed countries need to accelerate the speed of their transition to net-zero, should improve both the quantity and quality of climate finance, and consistently participate and adhere to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) obligations, among others.
In a statement, CEEW said, “We hope that outcomes of the CAM will help provide critical inputs and recommendations for upcoming climate summits, inform the next round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in 2025 and the subsequent Global Stocktake (GST) where countries and non-party stakeholders will deliberate on the implementation and ambitions of global climate efforts.”
