The Climate Actions and Policies Measurement Framework (CAPMF) is an internationally harmonised climate policy database developed by the OECD. It is based on a structured policy typology that tracks a common set of policies with common definitions and harmonised policy attributes on an annual basis.
The 2026 edition enhanced the geographical scope from 97 to 127 jurisdictions (126 countries and the EU-27 as a bloc), consistently covering the same 86 policies from 1990 to 2025. These jurisdictions account for over 80% of global GHG emissions including LULUCF. It covers all OECD countries except the United States, all G20 countries and all countries that account for more than 0.5% of global GHG emissions. The United States has chosen to not include their data in the CAPMF given concerns that the CAPMF does not fully or accurately capture U.S. climate action.
The geographical additions to the 2026 editions comprise Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Georgia, Guatemala, Guyana, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vanuatu. Data are drawn from international sources (OECD, IEA, ITF, World Bank) and complemented by extensive contributions from partner organisations, notably the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club, the World Bank and the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
The 86 climate actions and policies cover around 90% of policies listed in the latest IPCC report (IPCC, 2022[12]). The CAPMF comprises climate-positive instruments (e.g. carbon taxes), as well as reform of climate-negative measures (e.g. reform of fossil fuel subsidies). The CAPMF also includes some climate-relevant policies such as air pollution standards, i.e. policies whose primary intent is not mitigation, but which have a material effect on emissions. While the focus of the CAPMF is on national climate action, it also includes key subnational policies such as sub-national emissions trading schemes, fuel excise taxes and renewable portfolio standards, which are key in some countries.
For each policy, the CAPMF calculates policy stringency, defined as the degree to which policies incentivise emissions reductions, capturing the strength of individual instruments (e.g. carbon tax rates, emission limits, subsidy levels). For each policy, policy stringency is normalised on a scale from 0 (not adopted) over 1 (low stringency) to 10 (high stringency) to enable aggregation of policies into meaningful categories (e.g. policy instrument types, sectors).
For The Climate Action Monitor 2026 missing policy data in 2025 were substituted by the last observed data in the last five years. This concerns 18% (16 of 86) of the policies captured by the CAPMF. Substituting the imputed data by the actual data once they become available is unlikely to change the key results of Chapter 3. However, some messages may need to be refined, notably as country-level data on fossil fuel subsidies are not yet included.
Despite the enhanced scope, the CAPMF still has some limitations. Since it does not yet cover all countries or all policies, the results should be interpreted carefully. In particular, the results should be interpreted in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive way. The primary focus of the CAPMF is to track the evolution and stringency of mitigation policies over time, not to rank government’s climate action across countries. Other caveats are discussed in detail in the underlying working paper (Nachtigall, D. et al., 2022[13]). Despite these caveats, the CAPMF remains a unique database offering insights into increasingly complex and diverse climate policy approaches and trends worldwide.