India ranked 176th out of 177 nations in the 2026 Environment Performance Index (EPI), just ahead of Laos. In the same ranking, India was ranked 130th in climate change mitigation.
On the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), India ranked 23rd out of 63 countries and the European Union, as a “medium performer” from “high performer” status in 2025.
The Centre for Science and Environment’s own State of India’s Environment 2026 report found India had crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries, a framework scientists use to mark the safe limits for keeping Earth’s systems stable, including climate change, biosphere integrity and freshwater depletion.
Two different climate indices assess India’s performance very differently—one ranks India relatively well, while the other ranks it near the bottom. Why is there such a big difference?
What the EPI Measures, and Where India Lost Points
Researchers at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia Climate School’s Center for Integrated Earth System Information scored 177 countries on 47 indicators across 12 issue categories for the EPI, grouped under three goals: environmental health (25% of the score), ecosystem vitality (45%), and climate change mitigation (30%).
India ranked 174th in environmental health, 171st in ecosystem vitality, and 130th in climate change mitigation.
Zachary Wendling, Research Director for the EPI at Yale University, named water resources, forests, and biodiversity and habitat as India’s weakest categories.
Within biodiversity, he said, poorly managed marine protected areas caused the most damage, and land-based protected area indicators weren’t much better. India’s score for the effectiveness of its marine protected areas fell to zero, a measure of whether protected waters actually stop overfishing within their boundaries.
Several pollution-linked indicators worsened over the past decade, including deaths and illnesses linked to fine particulate matter, and exposure to carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide.
“India, whose per-capita emissions remain relatively low but are growing rapidly, faces an acute development-versus pollution tension as hundreds of millions of people gain access to modern energy services but at the price of serious urban air pollution and spiking GHG emissions,” the EPI report says.
Kiran Pandey of the Centre for Science and Environment cited research showing that air pollution in India is worsening
“In 2023, air pollution led to the loss of 59.4 million healthy life years (Disability Adjusted Life Years, DALYs). PM2.5 became the main cause, overtaking household air pollution, which was the leading source in 2014,” according to CSE’s State of India’s Environment 2026: In Figures, authored by Pandey.
This year’s edition added a new indicator, grassland conversion. India scored 43.99 here, sixth out of eight South Asian countries; Pakistan scored 73.95, ranking fourth in the region.
Other Indices and What EPI Leaves Out
The CCPI focuses narrowly on climate, not the broader environmental picture the EPI covers.
The CCPI scores countries on greenhouse gas emissions per person (40%), renewable energy (20%), energy use (20%), and climate policy (20%), and this year gave India a medium rating on three of those and a low rating on renewable energy.
India still has no national coal-exit timeline, continues to auction new coal blocks, and its carbon pricing remains weak, even as it hit 50% non-fossil power capacity five years ahead of its 2030 target.
Dr. Chirag Dhara, an associate professor of environmental studies at Krea University and a contributing author to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, has studied how indices like the EPI arrive at their numbers. In a paper published in the journal Climate Policy in October 2025, titled “Interpreting climate performance indices: implications for equitable and effective policy,” Dhara and his co-authors compared the EPI against the CCPI and the Climate Action Tracker.
“EPI, by construction, tends to favour affluent countries, whose annual emissions are now declining, over less-affluent countries like India,” Dhara told Ground Report over email.
He said the EPI focuses largely on how a country’s absolute
greenhouse-gas emissions have changed over time, while the CCPI largely focuses on a country’s current emissions regardless of the scale of its total country-wide emissions. The CCPI additionally considers renewable energy, energy use and climate policy. This difference in approach between the two indices effectively means that they are probing different aspects of (the complex socio-economic question of) climate performance.
India’s renewable energy rollout, Dhara said, mainly cut emissions in the power sector, not in industry or transport. So, the country’s total and per-person emissions kept rising even as the energy transition accelerated.
He pointed out that India had lagged behind China on electric vehicle adoption, and that low-carbon manufacturing technology remained largely locked behind patents held elsewhere.
What the Government Said Last Time
When the 2022 EPI edition put India dead last among 180 countries, the Union Environment Ministry rejected it within days, and said it “did not accept” the analysis or conclusions, and called the methodology “surmises and unscientific”.
The ministry’s specific complaint was about a new climate indicator, projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2050, which it said relied on a simple ten-year average rather than a fuller model accounting for renewable energy, carbon sinks and efficiency gains.
The ministry added that EPI ignored India’s forests and wetlands, which absorb carbon, and the country’s historically low per-person emissions.
EPI’s lead scientists pushed back at the time, telling Ground Report the index has always measured the current state of the environment, not historical emissions or policy intent, and that the team would welcome working with the ministry to sharpen future editions.
So far, the Union Environment Ministry has not issued a fresh statement on the 2026 ranking.
Wendling explained that the EPI used the latest scoring system to recalculate older data and compared it with the current edition. On comparison, he said, India’s environmental conditions have improved, even though its overall ranking remains low.
“While emissions of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases are still too high and rising, they are not rising as quickly as they have in the past,” Wendling told Ground Report over email.
Pandey cautioned against reading too much into the EPI’s year-on-year score shifts, and said it was more useful to track India’s score on individual indicators than the overall rank.
“No index should be considered objective truth,” Dhara said. “India could concede that it must bend the curve on its greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of its poor performance on indices like EPI, while at the same time asserting its entitlement to climate finance on the basis of its better performance on fairness-based indices like CCPI.”
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