Effective climate policy is central to sustainability transitions and to monitoring progress toward sustainable development, yet national climate policy ratings often differ in scope, indicator design, time coverage, and scoring logic, producing inconsistent country assessments. This creates a need for transparent tools that can compare, interpret, and contextualize existing indices rather than rely on any single metric. This paper develops an exploratory protocol for sustainability-oriented cross-index assessment of national climate policy effectiveness. We combine a structured comparative analysis and a SWOT-informed diagnostic synthesis of four representative approaches—the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the Climate Laws, Institutions, and Measures Index (CLIMI), and the Climate Policy Measure Index (CPMI)—with a pilot inter-index concordance test using rank-based correlation analysis for a small country sample and a common reference year (2012). The pilot is intended as an illustrative methodological example rather than a generalizable statistical test. The results indicate strong alignment among broad, composite approaches (CCPI, CAT, CLIMI), while an instrument-focused metric (CPMI, centered on carbon pricing and fiscal signals) shows weaker consistency with outcome- and governance-oriented ratings. Building on these insights, we compile an integrated indicator set that links outcomes (GHG levels and trends), structural drivers (energy mix, efficiency), policy instruments (pricing, regulation, subsidies), governance capacity (legal and institutional strength), and enabling conditions (finance, public engagement, international cooperation). We also specify the operational steps of the proposed workflow, including index selection, temporal harmonization, ordinal encoding, concordance analysis, discrepancy diagnosis, indicator mapping, and provisional normalization, weighting, aggregation, and validation rules for future composite implementation. The protocol should therefore be understood as a sustainability-oriented decision support workflow for interpreting agreements and disagreements across existing indices and for supporting more balanced evaluation of low-carbon transitions; a fully aggregated composite index with large-sample validation remains a task for future research.

Many national climate policies coexist with a persistent gap between stated temperature goals and observed emissions trends, creating a demand for transparent and comparable tools to evaluate policy effectiveness. However, widely used climate-policy ratings differ in scope, indicator design, time coverage, and scoring scales, often producing inconsistent country assessments and complicating evidence-based decision-making. This paper proposes an integrated protocol for cross-index assessment of national climate-policy effectiveness. We combine a comparative analysis and a SWOT analysis of four representative approaches - the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the Climate Laws, Institutions and Measures Index (CLIMI), and the Climate Policy Measure Index (CPMI) - with a pilot inter-index consistency test using correlation analysis for a small country sample. The pilot indicates strong alignment among broad, composite approaches (CCPI, CAT, CLIMI), while an instrument-focused metric (CPMI, centered on carbon-pricing and fiscal signals) shows weaker consistency with outcome- and gov-ernance-oriented ratings. Building on these insights, we compile an integrated indicator set that links outcomes (GHG levels and trends), structural drivers (energy mix, efficiency), policy in-struments (pricing, regulation, subsidies), governance capacity (legal and institutional strength), and enabling conditions (finance, public engagement, international cooperation). The proposed protocol is intended as a decision-support framework to reconcile discrepancies across existing indices and to structure multidimensional evaluations; limitations of the pilot analysis motivate a larger-sample validation and harmonization of index time frames in future work.

A decline in CO₂ emissions is often treated as evidence of successful climate policy, although the same outcome may reflect technological modernization, economic contraction, demographic decline, deindustrialization, or external shocks. This study develops a three-stage diagnostic framework combining additive Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition, sectoral carbon cost exposure, and an investment-capacity proxy to distinguish managed decarbonization from carbon-intensive decoupling and structural or shock-driven emissions decline. The framework is applied to Germany, Poland, and Ukraine for 1990-2024, with subperiods reflecting major structural transformations and shocks. Germany reduced emissions by 482.48 Mt CO₂ despite rising population and GDP per capita, as lower energy- and carbon-intensity more than offset these upward pressures. Poland reduced emissions by 103.48 Mt CO₂, through energy-intensity improvements, while carbon-intensity gains were more limited. Ukraine recorded the largest decline (564.03 Mt CO₂), but substantial contributions came from lower GDP per capita and population, while carbon-intensity increased emissions over the period. At a common benchmark of EUR 75.28/tCO₂, Ukraine has the highest exposure among the integrated-steel cases, whereas Poland has the highest exposure among the electricity cases. The findings show that emissions outcomes should be interpreted jointly with their drivers, sectoral carbon-price transmission, and the capacity to finance technological response.

A decline in CO₂ emissions is often treated as evidence of successful climate policy, although the same outcome may reflect technological modernization, economic contraction, demographic decline, deindustrialization, or external shocks. Accordingly, the objective is to test whether comparable headline reductions reflect different transition mechanisms when historical drivers, prospective indicative gross carbon-cost exposure, and investment capacity are evaluated jointly. We hypothesize that Germany is closest to managed decarbonization, Poland follows carbon-intensive decoupling, and Ukraine’s decline is predominantly structural or shock-driven and that the joint diagnostic indicates greater contraction risk where multiple investment-capacity measures are weakest, without implying a causal prediction of firm response. This study develops a three-stage diagnostic framework combining additive Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition, indicative gross sectoral carbon-cost exposure, and multiple macroeconomic investment-capacity indicators to distinguish managed decarbonization from carbon-intensive decoupling and structural or shock-driven emissions decline. The framework is applied to Germany, Poland, and Ukraine for 1990–2024, with subperiods reflecting major structural transformations and shocks. Germany reduced emissions by 482.48 Mt CO₂ despite rising population and GDP per capita, as lower energy and carbon intensity more than offset these upward pressures. Poland reduced emissions by 103.48 Mt CO₂ mainly through lower aggregate energy intensity, while carbon-intensity improvements were more limited. Ukraine recorded the largest decline (564.03 Mt CO₂), but substantial contributions came from lower GDP per capita and population, while carbon intensity increased emissions over the period. At a common benchmark of EUR 75.28/tCO₂, Ukraine has the highest indicative gross exposure among the integrated-steel cases, whereas Poland has the highest indicative gross exposure among the electricity cases. The findings show that emissions outcomes should be interpreted jointly with their drivers, sectoral carbon-price transmission, and the capacity to finance technological response.