Climate Change Performance Index 2026
Germanwatch, NewClimate Institute, Climate Action Network · Published 18 November 2025
Latest edition: 18 November 2025 · Next expected: November 2026
India falls to 23rd in this edition, down from 10th. But a Credibility Score of 30 says the method behind the rank has serious problems: a fifth of the score is expert judgment without named coders, and the expert selection is unpublished, so the method cannot be audited.
What the report claims
The Climate Change Performance Index ranks countries on greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy, energy use, and climate policy. India ranks 23rd of 63 countries plus the EU in the 2026 edition, with a score of 61.31, down from 10th in 2025 and now a medium performer rather than a high one. The fall is driven by the absence of a national coal exit timeline, continued coal block auctions, and a low rating in renewable energy, against medium ratings in emissions, energy use, and climate policy. The emissions and energy indicators cite official inventories and energy statistics, and India is observed on those series. The top three places are left empty by design, since no country is doing enough for the Paris goals, which compresses the ranking. The weaker part is the climate-policy slice, a fifth of the total, which rests on an expert questionnaire without a public coder list or inter-coder reliability; the 2026 country page names four contributors for India. The score of 61.31 carries no error bar. The binding limits are data transparency and independence: the raw datasets are not freely downloadable, the cleaning and imputation steps are unpublished, and the publishers are climate advocacy organisations whose project-level funding is undisclosed.
The Credibility Score, dimension by dimension
- Methodology transparency / replicability
- 7 / 20
- Source verifiability + measurement integrity
- 7 / 25
- Internal consistency of India’s place
- 8 / 20
- Construct validity / India coverage
- 4 / 10
- Independence and funding
- 3 / 20
- Accountability (corrections, versioning)
- 1 / 5
Funding and independence: The index is co-produced by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and Climate Action Network, all organisations with explicit climate advocacy missions, and the advocacy network co-owns the ranking and supplies the policy experts who score a fifth of it. Funding comes from German government and foundation project grants, including the Barthel Foundation, but project-level amounts are not disclosed, there is no independent academic oversight board, and no public corrections log or errata policy is published.
Sources: Germanwatch, NewClimate Institute, and Climate Action Network, Climate Change Performance Index 2026
Previous edition: Climate Change Performance Index 2025 · India 10th of 63, Credibility Score 32 · Misleading
Updated 9 November 2026