Bengaluru: India ranks second from lowest – 176 – in this year’s Environment Performance Index (EPI), a global index that rates countries based on indicators pertaining to environmental health, ecosystem vitality and mitigating climate change.India has an overall EPI score of 22.46 (on a range of 0 to 100). In contrast, the best performing country, Estonia, has an EPI score of 74.79. India also had the lowest regional ranking (eight), among eight south Asian countries.The last EPI (in 2024) ranked India at 176 among 180 countries. Previously, EPI 2022 ranked India at 180, at the very bottom. This ranking had prompted the Indian government to issue a statement a few days later claiming that the Index was based on “surmises and unscientific methods”.Global rankings for environmental performanceScientists from institutes including the universities of Yale and Columbia put together a global Environment Performance Index (EPI) every two years. The Index is calculated for each country by compiling data (from numerous sources including satellite imagery) on several indicators and specific ‘issue categories’ under policy objectives. One policy objective is ‘environmental health’; it includes issue categories such as air quality, and indicators such as ambient fine particulate matter levels. Another policy objective is ecosystem vitality, which reflects how well countries manage their natural resources. It includes indicators such as tree cover loss, pesticide pollution risks and marine habitat protection. The third policy objective is climate change mitigation, which includes indicators such as carbon dioxide and methane emission trends. All these are taken into account to provide each country with an overall EPI score from 0 to 100: the higher the score, the better its performance in comparison to its peers. For the 2026 report, the EPI team ranked 177 countries on 47 environmental indicators across 12 issue categories in three policy objectives (environmental health which made up 25% of the total score, ecosystem vitality which contributed 45% to the total score and climate change, which contributed 30%). For the first time, the EPI also incorporated grassland conversion as an indicator this year, because despite the importance of grasslands for carbon sequestration and numerous other ecosystem services, these habitats have received extremely less attention in terms of policy and conservation. Methodologies can change across years – a reason why comparing between EPI reports for different years may prove difficult. The EPI 2022, for instance, analysed 40 performance indicators, while EPI 2024 analysed 58 indicators. According to the EPI 2026, Estonia retains its top ranking with an EPI of 74.79. Its high performance is primarily due to its “substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in power generation over the past decade as it ramped up renewable electricity and shut down fossil fuel production”, per a press statement. Estonia is also among the top performing countries worldwide on biodiversity and ecosystem protection. The last EPI had also ranked Estonia at the top.Much like last year, European countries held all the top five ranks. In EPI 2026, Luxembourg came second, followed by the United Kingdom, Finland, and the Netherlands. Laos exhibited the worst performance in EPI 2026, with a score of 21.78, and the lowest rank of 177.India, second from lowestJust ahead of Laos and with a total EPI score of 22.46, India ranked at 176. In terms of the specific policy objectives, India ranked 174 in environmental health, 171 in ecosystem vitality and 130 in climate change policies.“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 report noted.Several of India’s air quality indicators across ten years such as the burden of death and disease from exposure to fine particulate matter, and carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxides exposures, showed a negative value – indicating that India fared badly in those aspects across the ten year period. India’s Marine Protected Area effectiveness was also extremely low (and negative, at -51.77) for this time period. EPI researchers said in a statement that India’s very weak performance reflects critical air quality problems, continued reliance on coal-fired power and lack of biodiversity protections.The negative change in the score for India’s “Regional Marine Trophic Index” (-10.27) could be interpreted as India, having over-fished fish stocks at the top of the food chain, resorted to catching more and more fish further down the food chain, said Zachary Wendling, Research Director for the EPI at the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy.“That is the intent of this metric, though among scientists and economists, there are alternative explanations, for example, a fishing fleet may switch effort to catching a lower trophic level not because higher-level species are scarce but because lower-level species are more profitable,” Wendling told The Wire over email.Is India’s performance improving?But despite India’s low EPI score and second-from lowest-rank (176), its ten-year-change remained positive (+7.47), and higher than a few other countries such as Romania (-0.91) and the Dominican Republic (-3.04). That’s because overall, applying the EPI’s current methods to historical data does show that India’s performance has increased over time, said Wendling. While emissions are still high, the rate of increase of some components – including air pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides – have slowed, he told The Wire.“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,” he said.India’s government has rejected the EPI previouslyWhen the EPI 2022 listed India at the lowest rank (180), the Union Environment Ministry said in a press release two days later that it “does not accept” the Index’s analysis and conclusions for several reasons, including changes in methodology and alleged that the Index was based on “surmises and unscientific methods”. The Indian government listed several concerns regarding methodology, such as the EPI not taking into account India’s historical data on its low emissions and how the ranking and importance of some environmental indicators have changed. However, the lead scientist of the EPI had responded to the Ministry’s allegations and told The Wire that the EPI has always ranked countries on the current state of environmental conditions and not on historical emissions or policy intent, and that the EPI would be happy to collaborate with the Ministry as it improves its analyses over the years to come.