Just Transition Score

Urgent action is needed to accelerate the decarbonisation of our economies while sustaining improvements in the quality of life for people around the world, particularly the most vulnerable. This is the challenge of a just transition.

The new Just Transition Score from the Social Progress Imperative shows which countries have been better at improving their social progress while reducing their carbon emissions and which are lagging.

The Global Goal on Adaptation declared in the Paris Agreement aims to "enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change, to contribute to sustainable development and ensure an adequate adaptation response in the context of the Agreement's temperature goal of limiting warming to well below 2 or 1.5 °C." (IPCC 2022). If we don't reduce our carbon emissions in time we become increasingly vulnerable, we face economic loss, deterioration of the quality of life and increased loss of life.

The Just Transition Score shows where these goals meet - reducing our carbon emissions while adapting to climate change and improving the quality of life of people. The Just Transition Score combines the comprehensive, human-centered measurement of the Social Progress Index with data on countries’ consumption-based per capita CO₂ emissions. The Just Transition Score measures countries’ ratio of carbon emissions per capita to the Social Progress Index, it tells us how carbon efficient a country is at creating positive social outcomes. The ratio is scaled from 0 (worst performance) to 100 (best performance). Countries with the highest score are those that are most effectively tackling the climate crisis while delivering social progress for their people. Covering 158 countries, the Just Transition Score tracks progress over time from 2011-2022.