Climate and Development KPIs

How committed are countries to tackling climate change at home and in developing countries?

These tables provides nine key indicators on the world’s major economies spanning their climate contributions in three areas: emissions, policy, and international finance. Indicators are calculated to be comparable between countries with several expressed relative to population or economy size. Countries are ordered by the number of indicators on which they score in the best quartile, with indicators shaded for top quartile performance.

High-income “Annex II” countries

Per head emissions vary among Annex II countries, with Australia, the US, and Canada each more than four times Sweden’s level. Even so, all the countries have reduced their emissions per head in the last five years. Four countries are yet to implement a carbon price above $5 per tonne, suggesting plenty of room to improve their fiscal position. The average share of GNI on climate and development finance is 0.39 percent, with 27 percent typically allocated to climate finance. Still, just 32 percent is focussed on adaptation, with no county allocating more than 45 percent despite developing countries calls for this to be the priority.

Other high-income countries

Emissions per head varies much more across the high-income group, with Saudi Arabia and UAE above all Annex II countries. Russia and UAE are the only high-income countries (including Annex II) to see emissions rise over the past five years. Only three countries in this group have a carbon price in place (all through the EU Emissions Trading Scheme), while fossil fuel subsidies in Chile, Hungary and Czechia are among the lowest in all countries. Finance for climate and development is under half the Annex II figure, at 0.16 percent of GNI.

Major middle-income countries

Emissions per head are the lowest in the middle-income group despite rising in the past five years for all but two countries (Argentina and South Africa). Ambition in NDCs is also notably lower except for Brazil. None of the middle-income countries has a meaningful carbon price but both fossil fuel production and subsidies are much lower than in the high-income countries.

Data and sources

The data, calculations, and links to sources are available here. The emissions and policy indicators are updated from CGD’s Commitment to Development Index. The full method is described here. These use the latest available data for each country, mostly from 2022 or 2023.

Finance for International Development (FID) measures cross-border international finance in developing countries. We include development as well as climate finance as the former also plays a key role in dealing with climate change. The “climate share” is the grant-equivalent value of climate spend expressed as a proportion of FID and combines bilateral and multilateral spend. The “adaptation share” is expressed as a share of mitigation plus adaptation (i.e. excluding cross-cutting and all in grant-equivalent).

To discuss this work or connect with CGD researchers at COP29, please contact Edward Wickstead on [email protected].