- India’s poor score on the 2026 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has reignited an old debate about fairness with developing countries.
- Different climate rankings diverge because they rest on different ethical premises, not because one is wrong.
- India would be better served by reading multiple indices together and taking a consistent, principled stance.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author.
The 2022 version of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), one of the world’s best-known environmental indices, produced biennially by Yale and Columbia Universities, sparked an acerbic debate in India when it assessed the country as one of the worst performers among 180 countries.
Environment and policy experts Navroz K. Dubash and Sharachchandra Lele, in an opinion piece called the EPI’s methodology “indefensible and tone-deaf” on ethics. Others argued that the index pushes a worldview that suits the “developed world,” and proposed that India build its own benchmarking system. The Indian Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) went so far as to issue a stringent public rebuttal, which, unusually, elicited a robust counter-rebuttal by the EPI developers.
A few months later in 2022, another well-known index called the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and Climate Action Network (CAN) International, released its rankings, which differed sharply from the EPI by ranking India among the world’s best climate performers. In response, the Ministry issued a press release welcoming the CCPI.
Why do credible, science-based indices arrive at conflicting assessments for the same country? What, then, do we make of any country’s “true” climate performance?
These questions have yet again been thrown into sharp relief with the 2026 edition of the EPI released on July 9. European countries have again been ranked the world’s best performers and India among the worst. It would be easy to read these results as merely the latest chapter of an old debate, but a closer look at the results in relation to other indices reveals the need for deeper scrutiny.
The case of Morocco and the U.S.A. is illustrative. The latest EPI’s climate change component scores Morocco among the bottom third of all countries. In contrast, Morocco is ranked among the world’s few best climate performers under the CCPI’s latest (2026) rankings. The U.S.A. presents a mirror image, sitting comfortably in the upper quarter of the world on the EPI’s climate scores, while the CCPI ranks it among the world’s worst performers.
In a paper we published in 2024 in the journal Climate Policy, we trace much of this divergence to the scientific and ethical principles that an index espouses.
The fairness question
Each index rests on different, yet largely unstated, premises about what climate performance means. The EPI’s climate-change module, built almost entirely around absolute and projected GHG emissions, is grounded in the scientific fact that the atmosphere responds only to the total stock of greenhouse gas emissions, not the socio-economic purpose the emissions served. This approach is in line with a restricted interpretation of the well-known ‘polluter pays’ principle, which penalises industrialising countries for their increasing emissions regardless of the developmental context in which they occur.
On the other hand, the CCPI, which only considers emissions per person, leans towards a more fairness-based approach that is (partially) in the spirit of the ethical principle that each person has an equal claim to the atmosphere as a shared, finite resource. This logic penalises affluent countries for their large per-capita emissions, in contrast to the EPI.
The choice of ethical principles embedded in an index can considerably shape its outcomes. Our published paper demonstrates this by building a modified version of the EPI’s climate-change module, replacing just its two most heavily weighted indicators with fairness-based equivalents while leaving the rest of the index’s architecture untouched. The effect is striking: under this fairness adjustment, South Asia and the wider Global South rise sharply in the rankings, while most affluent countries scoring well on the standard EPI drop to the bottom of our modified index.
These findings corroborate the criticism that was levelled at the EPI for being antithetical to equity and fairness. Yet, it would be a leap in logic to conflate the absence of fairness with a lack of legitimacy. Instead, we contend that the EPI is valuable in its own right.
The reason that EPI and CCPI yield divergent results is that they ask fundamentally different questions. The EPI’s climate module asks, “Is a country’s marginal contribution to global warming rising or falling?” while the CCPI asks, “Is this country appropriating more than its fair share of the atmospheric commons?”
Clearly, both questions are legitimate and do not stand in contradiction. India, for instance, is contributing substantially to global warming in absolute terms with CO2 emissions exceeding 3 billion tonnes annually (and rising), yet having consumed far less than its “fair share” of the carbon budget. This explains why India scores poorly on the EPI but well on the CCPI.
Such a divergence in approaches is not new. In 1990, the Washington-based World Resources Institute published a report concluding that developing countries, India and China prominent among them, bore nearly half the responsibility for global warming. The following year, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi answered with a rebuttal titled Global Warming in an Unequal World. They argued that the WRI’s method allocated the atmosphere’s finite absorptive capacity in proportion to how much each country already emitted, handing the largest historical polluters the biggest share of a resource that belonged to all humanity. Agarwal and Narain argued that it should instead be divided equally. Their essay helped shape the developing world’s case for equity in the run-up to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. The WRI-versus-Agarwal-and-Narain exchange foreshadowed the divide embedded in today’s climate indices, between the absolute-emissions premise of EPI-like approaches and the emissions-per-person premise of CCPI-like ones.
The key point is that both approaches are grounded in well-established scientific and ethical principles, and neither can be dismissed as objectively fallacious. They represent different facets of the complex social-environmental question of climate performance, for which multiple perspectives, seemingly irreconcilable, can co-exist.
The real fallacy, then, would be to treat indices as neutral scientific verdicts. The reality is that the choice of which index to create, or to trust, is itself a subtly political act.
Engagement over rejection
Thailand offers a useful, if imperfect, example of a more constructive response to an unfavourable ranking than summary dismissal. In 2022, even as India and EPI developers were locked in dispute, Thailand’s National Environment Board set up a dedicated subcommittee to study the EPI’s methodology, tasked government agencies with reporting data against its indicators every year, and folded the framework into national and provincial planning. Thailand’s EPI climate ranking has since risen over 50 places from 106th in EPI-2022 to 53rd in the latest EPI. This is not proof that engagement alone produced the improvement, nor should Thailand’s approach be treated as the only sound response to a discomfiting index. The more pertinent lesson lies in Thailand’s coherent institutional response towards improving its environmental performance.
Caution is, however, warranted. When any single indicator becomes the target of policy rather than a proxy for a more complex reality, it risks shedding the very meaning it was built to capture, an idea known as Goodhart’s law. Colonial Hanoi’s bounty on rats provides a classic illustration. In 1902, French administrators bent on ridding the plague-threatened city of its rats paid a reward for every rat tail turned in, but soon found tailless rats scurrying through the streets, released to breed by residents who found a live rat worth more than a dead one.
None of this means defending the EPI as it stands. It remains genuinely one-sided and inadequate as its critics contend. But the answer isn’t to dismiss the EPI as illegitimate, or worse yet, as an inconvenience. India faces undeniable environmental challenges, including soaring air pollution, water pollution, biodiversity degradation, and poor waste management, that require urgent policy attention. An attempt to dismiss these realities simply because of an uncomfortable international ranking is a dangerous compromise on our collective health.
Neither is the answer merely to create another index designed to ascribe India a higher rank. Every index that we conceive of will represent certain perspectives to the exclusion of others.
Ultimately, the debate on climate performance would be better served if index developers examined the ramifications of their design choices, and stated them transparently. Likewise, governance institutions, policymakers, and the media should ground their interpretations in a holistic set of ethical principles, avoiding the trap of viewing any single index as a definitive verdict. Uncomfortable results are not grounds for reflexive rejection.
A constructive outcome would be to read multiple indices simultaneously and develop a consistent, principled stand. For instance, India could concede that it must bend the curve on its greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of its poor performance on indices emphasising absolute emissions. At the same time, India could assert its entitlement to climate finance based on its better performance on fairness-based indices. Such a stance — backed up by action — would lend India diplomatic weight as a well-meaning, authentic climate leader in the Global South.
Banner image: A worker clears weeds from Dal lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)
The author is a sustainability scientist at Krea University.
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