Bans and phase-outs are regulatory instruments that mandate the cessation of the construction (ban) or the usage (phase-out) of certain activities.
CH4 are methane emissions from solid waste, livestock, mining of hard coal and lignite, rice paddies, agriculture and leaks from natural gas pipelines.
Climate actions and policy instruments (or “policies”) are policy instruments or other actions that have the explicit intent of achieving declared policy objectives to advance mitigation or are non-climate policies that are expected to have a material effect on GHG emissions. A policy is considered as adopted when it is effective in national legislation.
Climate actions and policies are divided into three types:
Sectoral policies can be restricted to or are designed to apply to a specific source or economic sector.
Cross-sectoral policies cut across more than one emission’s source or sector. These are overarching policy areas to mitigate or remove domestic GHG emissions that cannot be easily attributed to a specific sector.
International policies refer to commitments associated with international covenants or agreements where more than one country participates.
Climate-related extreme weather events are defined as a weather event resulting in 10 or more casualties, 100 or more affected people, the declaration of a state of emergency or a call for international assistance. Climate-related weather events include meteorological (extreme temperature, fog, storm), hydrological (wave action, landslide, flood) and climatological (wildfire, glacial lake outburst, drought). EM‑DAT data cover both independent countries and dependent territories.
Coastal flooding threatens coastal regions and communities, affecting the population, built-up areas and other infrastructures. This indicator presents the annual percentage of the population exposed to coastal flooding with a 10, 25, 50 and 100-year return period. Data are expressed in percentages. Measuring population exposure to coastal flooding is possible using the World Bank coastal flood hazard maps (Muis et al., 2016), presenting a global re-analysis of storm surges and extreme sea-level events based on hydrodynamic modelling.
Extreme precipitation refers to a daily precipitation that exceeds the 99th percentile value over the reference period 1981-2010. Unlike a monthly approach, used for example for extreme temperature, percentiles are computed using all wet days of the reference period (i.e. 1981-2010) because the data sample would otherwise be too small to robustly compute seasonally adjusted percentiles. It defines a wet day as a day where total precipitation is above or equal to 1 mm. Since percentiles are computed using all wet days of the reference period in a given location, this implies a different occurrence frequency between different locations.
Demand-based GHG emissions encompass GHG emissions from the resident households of a country, as well as direct and indirect upstream emissions from its final expenditure of final goods and services.
Domestic material consumption (DMC) refers to the materials directly used in an economy, which refers to the apparent consumption of materials. DMC is computed as domestic extraction used minus exports plus imports.
Effective Carbon Rate (ECR) is the sum of fuel excise taxes, carbon taxes and tradeable permits that effectively put a price on carbon emissions. The Net ECR equals the ECR minus fossil fuel subsidies that decrease pre-tax fossil fuel prices.
Environmentally related taxes are compulsory, unrequited payments to government levied on tax bases deemed to be of environmental relevance, i.e. taxes that have a tax base with a proven, specific negative impact on the environment.
Fire danger is estimated with the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), adjusted to account for biomass availability. Fire danger is defined as FWI values of 5 or higher, indicating very high or extreme fire danger.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions refer to the sum of GHGs that have direct effects on climate change and are considered responsible for a major part of global warming: carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulphur hexafluoride (SF₆) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃). They refer to GHGs emitted within the national territory and may include or exclude emissions and removals from land-use change and forestry. They do not cover international transactions of emissions reduction units or certified emissions reductions. GHG emissions estimates are divided into main sectors, which are groupings of related processes, sources and sinks.
Hot days are defined as those during which daily maximum temperature surpasses 35°C. Due to the resolution of the raw data, heat stress for small islands may be slightly underestimated. Several additional indicators also describe heat stress (such as the Universal Thermal Climate Index, or UTCI), which also takes moisture, wind and solar radiation into account); these should be considered for a more thorough analysis of exposure to heat for single countries.
Icing days are defined as days where the daily maximum temperature does not exceed 0°C.
Land exposure to cyclones: Category 1 cyclones on the Saffir-Simpson scale are described as “very dangerous winds that will produce some damage”. Higher categories cover extensive, devastating and catastrophic damage, respectively. The return period is the average or estimated time that a specific climate-related hazard is likely to recur.
Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal: In Art. 2, the Paris Agreement, seeking to strengthen the global response to climate change, reaffirms the goal of limiting global temperature increase to well below 2°C, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.
Paris Agreement mitigation goal: In Art. 4, the Paris Agreement establishes binding commitments by all Parties to prepare, communicate and maintain a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and to pursue domestic measures to achieve them. It also prescribes that Parties shall communicate their NDCs every five years and provide information necessary for clarity and transparency. To set a firm foundation for higher ambition, each successive NDC will represent a progression beyond the previous one and reflect the highest possible ambition. Developed countries should continue to take the lead through absolute economy-wide reduction targets. Meanwhile, developing countries should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts, and are encouraged to move towards economy-wide targets over time in the light of different national circumstances.
Policy approaches define countries’ climate policy landscape. Policy approaches are the combination of countries’ climate action (i.e. the number and stringency of its policies) and the types (e.g. market-based and non-market-based instruments) and areas (e.g. sectoral and cross-sectoral policies) of climate policies.
Policy instruments are institutional vehicles or tools through which governments facilitate the implementation of domestic and international objectives.
Market-based instruments incentivise specific behaviour through a direct monetary transaction, influencing the prices or levels of production or consumption at the margin. Market-based instruments covered by the CAPMF include explicit (carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes) and implicit carbon pricing instruments (fuel excise taxes), among others.
Non-market-based instruments seek to guide production or consumption decisions towards low-carbon alternatives through legal obligations, non-monetary incentives, enhanced information or enabling conditions (e.g. public transport infrastructure).
Policy stringency is the degree to which climate actions and policies incentivise or enable GHG emissions mitigation at home or abroad. The CAPMF calculates stringency as a relative concept by assigning a score between 0 (not stringent) and 10 (very stringent) for each policy variable based on the in-sample distribution across all countries and years of the policy variables’ level (e.g. tax rate, emissions limit value, government expenditure).
Population and built-up area exposure to river flooding: River floods exposure indicators were computed using JRC River Flood Hazard Maps for Europe and the Mediterranean Basin region, and for the World (Dottori et al., 2021[8]). The maps depict flood-prone areas for river flood events for six different flood frequencies (from 1-in-10-years to 1-in-500-years). Cell values on these maps indicate the water depth (in m). For countries in Europe and around the Mediterranean Basin, the regional flood hazard maps were used, as the spatial resolution is higher (100 m) than the global maps (1 km). For the remaining countries, the global maps were used. To get flood-prone areas, a threshold of 1 cm was applied on the water depth. The return period is the average or estimated time that a specific climate-related hazard is likely to recur.
Production-based GHG emissions are estimated according to the residence principle. They refer to the GHG emitted from the resident economic activities and households of a country.
Soil moisture anomaly in cropland is a suitable indicator for monitoring the intensity of droughts and shows similar performances in identifying droughts to the Standardized Precipitation Index. Copernicus CDS ERA5-Land monthly averaged data and Copernicus global land cover data are used to calculate average cropland soil moisture anomaly.
Total energy supply (TES), or total primary energy supply, is made up of production + imports - exports - international marine bunkers - international aviation bunkers ± stock changes. Primary energy comprises coal, peat and peat products, oil shale, natural gas, crude oil and oil products, nuclear and renewable energy (bioenergy, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, solar and wind). Electricity trade is included in TES but excluded from the calculation of the breakdown by source.
Tropical nights are defined as nights where the minimum temperature does not fall below 20°C. Due to the resolution of the raw data, heat stress for small islands may be slightly underestimated. Several additional indicators describe heat stress (such as the Universal Thermal Climate Index), which also takes moisture, wind and solar radiation into account; these should be considered for a more thorough analysis of exposure to heat for single countries.