The United States’ interim score of 0.42 puts it in 4th place.

“This is sort of underperforming for them,” Fitzgerald says. “They typically have a slightly higher average interim compliance score. And they also typically end up being ranked about third. They dipped a little bit because Japan did so well this year.”

Italy usually scores the lowest in compliance reports and did so again this time, with a score of 0.21. Russia dipped a bit in the interim report.

Specifics

The G8 Research Group Compliance Report looks at specific topics, such as Afghanistan and terrorism.

“Security commitments were fairly well scored actually this year. And they’re typically issues that receive the greatest amount of attention from the G8 countries when we look at these commitments,” she says.

The average commitment to Afghanistan received an “incredibly high score” of 0.89. Also, efforts to combat Somali piracy also received a great deal of attention.

“Terrorism was a little bit lower. The terrorism commitment we were look at was the Financial Action Task Force. We’re seeing full compliance from about half of the countries. The only outlier in terms of the security commitment…was the African peace support initiative,” she says.

Hot on climate change

“The climate change commitments were generally very strong this year, particularly in the issues of financing and research technology and development,” she says.