Standards and methodology – Green Diplomat

Independence

Green Diplomat is an independent initiative, conducted in a personal capacity and outside its founder’s professional duties. Views expressed on this site are personal and do not represent any employer, institution or government.

We take no campaign positions. Partnership and funding support the work and confer no advisory role, influence over research or institutional endorsement. Our analysis relies only on public, published sources and contains no privileged or non-public information.

Sources

We prefer primary legal texts (statutes, decrees, official gazettes and regulators’ notices) and the international organisations and research institutions that produce data as their core work, including the UNFCCC secretariat, the IPCC, the World Bank, the International Carbon Action Partnership, IRENA, the OECD, the WMO, the Global Carbon Project and the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.

Every figure names its publisher and the edition it was taken from.
Where a figure reaches us through a secondary source, we say so on the chart or record.
We do not model, estimate or adjust published figures.

How a Radar record is verified

Each record in the AI Policy Radar states the legal stage of one instrument: proposed, in rulemaking, enacted, in force, or no binding instrument. The stage is assigned from the document the record cites, and the record shows the date it was last checked against that source.

Records are re-checked when the law moves or when a reader reports a change. A record is an educational summary of the legal position on the date of the check; it is not legal advice and is not intended for compliance purposes.

How to read a stage trace

Each record’s trace places its documented legal steps on three levels: tabled (Proposed), adopted but not yet binding (Enacted, or In rulemaking), and binding (In force). The line rises when a step is documented. It does not measure ambition, quality or effect. A drop, or a tick marked Reversal, shows a documented step that reduced the instrument’s legal force or coverage. Steps are curated: we draw only those we can source.

Official and reference sources

Every record says which kind of document it was checked against. An official source is the law itself, an official gazette or legislation portal, or the government body or regulator responsible for the instrument. A reference source is a recognised compilation of official texts, such as the International Carbon Action Partnership’s factsheets or Climate Change Laws of the World.

Reference sources are reliable starting points and are labelled as such on the record. Where a record relies on one, its legal reference names the underlying act, and the dated milestones of its legal journey link official pages wherever we could verify them. Moving every record to an official source is a standing priority.

Mapping to transparency reports

Under the Paris Agreement’s enhanced transparency framework, each Party reports the status of its policies and measures as planned, adopted or implemented (decision 18/CMA.1, annex, paragraph 82). To help teams preparing Biennial Transparency Reports, every record carries an indicative equivalent:

Proposed / announced → planned
In rulemaking → adopted (the enabling law exists; implementing rules are pending)
Enacted, not yet in force → adopted
In force → implemented (the start year is the year obligations first apply)

The mapping is a reading aid, not a determination: each national team decides the status it reports. The equivalent appears on every record and in the open data as btr_status.

Pledge and law

For each country with a ledger we record the latest NDC on the UNFCCC registry and where its headline target and the country’s net-zero target are anchored.

In statute: the figure is written in an Act or equivalent primary law; we cite the section.
Set under a statutory process: a law requires the government to set the target and it was set that way, but the figure is not in the statute; we cite both.
Policy only: the target appears in a policy document or the NDC, with no statutory basis in the laws the Radar tracks.
Not yet communicated: the country has not communicated a target of that kind to the UNFCCC.
Not yet assessed: the legal basis has not yet been read closely enough to classify it; the entry may cite a related document for reference.

“Not in a law the Radar tracks” means only that: other laws may exist. We record what is published; we do not rate ambition.

How the Radar relates to other trackers

Excellent public databases already cover climate law at scale. Climate Policy Radar and Climate Change Laws of the World help you find climate laws and policies from every country; the International Carbon Action Partnership and the World Bank document carbon-pricing instruments; Climate Watch covers national climate plans. The Radar does not try to match their breadth.

It does one narrower thing: for a curated set of instruments, it records what legal stage each has reached, since when, on what evidence, and the dated milestones along the way, with a public log of every change. Where a fuller document collection exists elsewhere, we link to it. The Radar describes; it does not rate or rank governments.

How data is presented

Series that changed definition between editions are labelled as reported headlines, not as consistent time series.
Different measures are shown in separate charts; we do not use dual axes.
Every chart has a table view and a CSV download, and links to its source.

Corrections

If you find an error, please tell us, with the page and the source you are relying on. We check every report, correct errors promptly, and note significant corrections on the page concerned. Every change and correction to a Radar record is listed, with its date, in the register of changes and corrections.

Use of AI tools

Records are researched and verified by a person against the source they cite; no record is published or changed by AI alone. We use AI tools to help search sources and draft summaries, and every published record and figure links to the source it was checked against, so that any claim can be verified independently.

Ask the Radar answers from the Radar’s own verified records. When AI briefings are switched on, a language model (Gemini, by Google, or Claude, by Anthropic; the note under the question box names the one in use) only summarises those records. Every answer lists the records it relied on, with the date each was last verified, and when the records do not cover a question, it says so rather than guessing. Questions are sent without any name, email or network address and are not stored with any identifier, and we use these services under paid API terms, under which inputs and outputs are not used to train their models. Answers are information, not legal advice.

Reuse and open data

You may quote and cite our analysis with attribution to Green Diplomat and a link to the page. The AI Policy Radar records are open data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0): download them as CSV or JSON, query them without a key, or embed the live map, from the Open data page.

Data shown in the Data Hub remains the work of its original publishers and should be cited to them. Use the “Cite” button on articles, records and datasets for a ready-made reference.

Change history

When a record changes legal stage, has its stage date corrected, gains a new step in its legal journey or is re-verified, the change is logged with its date and shown on the record under “Record history”. The same changes are published in an updates feed and, month by month, on What moved on the Radar.