A climate index for the world's countries
Mistra has initiated a collaboration with AccountAbility — an independent organization that works to develop new ideas, tools and collaboration to help individuals, institutions and organizations better address climate change and work toward achieving sustainable development.
AccountAbility collaborates with a number of organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and now even Mistra, which is supporting their activities with a contribution of 200,000 US dollars over two years. Goals
One of the goals of the organization is to create an index — the Country Climate Competitiveness Index — of potentials for economic development coupled to low carbon-dioxide emissions, as input to the climate conference in Copenhagen in the fall of 2009. The index will describe countries´ current status with respect to carbon-dioxide emissions, and their potential to become so-called low-emissions countries, coupled to economic development.
Hurried collecting
Better understanding countries´ different situations and potential for change requires not only looking at what countries emit today, but also the conditions in each country with respect to both reducing emissions and also achieving economic development. For example, many of the world's developing countries are low-emission countries today, but haven't achieved the same levels of development as industrialized countries. With help of the index, it will be easier to see the potential for individual countries to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions and, hopefully, speed up the collection of data.
