Greece Moves Up 10 Spots in the Climate Change Performance Index

Greece has moved up 10 spots in the Climate Change Performance Index’s 2022 ranking released last week.

Greece went from the 24th to 34th place in the CCPI’s 2022 report. The authors note that Greece was able to rise the ranks of the index partially because of its plan to eliminate lignite, a form of coal that is less carbon-dense.

The improvement was also attributed to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ climate law presented at the COP26 summit, as well as the latest edition of the country’s National Plan for Energy and Climate, which aims to hit the European Union’s emissions goals for the end of the decade.

The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) analyzes the impact 64 countries and the European Union (counted as a whole) have made on the world in their response to the issue of climate change, ranking them based on their positive engagement with the environment.

Greece lands in the “yellow” zone of this year’s Climate Change Performance Index

The team behind the index stated that none of the countries evaluated met their standard for the top three spots in the index this year which qualify a country’s positive effect on climate change as “very high.”

Leading the group at number four, however, is Denmark, with an overall index rating of 76.92. The country was joined at the top by fellow Northern European countries Sweden and Norway — which ranked fifth and sixth, respectively – -all meeting the standards of “high” performance in working atop ameliorate the climate crisis.

Of the countries so evaluated, Greece landed somewhere in the middle, coming in at number 24 on the index, a yellow coded ranking that denotes a “medium” amount of engagement with climate change.

The bottom five are Kazakhstan, followed by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Canada and Taiwan.

The world’s second-highest emitter, the US, climbed up six places from last year’s position but its response was still rated “very low” overall, ranking 51st among individual countries. China, the world’s largest emitter of pollution, was 33rd.

Australia slipped four places on the index from the previous year, when it was 50th, and it was the only country allocated a score of zero in the climate policy category, faring only slightly better in three other areas.

The CCPI uses a combination of different factors to determine its rankings, stating in the foreword of the report that the index is created by evaluating “global greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy, energy use, and climate policy:”

“The CCPI aims to enhance transparency in international climate politics and enables comparison of climate protection efforts and progress made by individual countries. The climate protection performance of those countries, which together account for 92% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is assessed in four categories: GHG Emissions, Renewable Energy, Energy Use and Climate Policy.”