In 2022, the Yale–Columbia Environmental Performance Index ranked India among the worst of 180 countries. The same year, the Climate Change Performance Index ranked India among the world’s best. Neither index made an arithmetic mistake. The EPI’s climate score is built almost entirely on absolute and projected greenhouse gas emissions; the CCPI counts emissions per person. Change the ethical premise, and the villain changes. In the 2026 editions the United States sits in the EPI’s upper quarter even as Trump shreds climate policy, while the CCPI puts it among the worst. Thailand climbed from 106th in 2022 to 53rd in 2026. Navroz Dubash and Sharachchandra Lele called the EPI’s ethics indefensible and tone-deaf — the same fight Agarwal and Narain took up in 1991 against a World Resources Institute report that pinned nearly half the blame for global warming on developing countries. India’s emissions, past 3 billion tonnes a year and rising, must fall. But the Modi government cannot keep hiding behind per-capita arithmetic while it clears forests and hands coal blocks to its corporate friends.
🔗 Read more: https://india.mongabay.com/2026/08/the-fraught-politics-and-ethics-of-climate-rankings-commentary/
