Oriental Republic of Uruguay

This special award recognises the Oriental Republic of Uruguay for choosing decarbonisation over militarisation, and for doing so within one of the most stable democracies in the world. The Carbon Positive Awards introduced the Leadership for Peace recognition to honour a nation whose public priorities reflect a rare and deliberate balance: investing in the clean energy transition while keeping military expenditure modest, all under full democratic governance and strong human-rights protections.

Our assessment applies a transparent, public-evidence framework — the ratio of transition investment to defence spending, adjusted by the cleanliness of the national electricity matrix, the quality of democracy, and the respect for human and civil rights.

On every one of these dimensions, Uruguay stands out. Roughly 98% of its electricity now comes from renewable sources — hydropower, wind, biomass and solar — a transformation achieved in under two decades through sustained public policy and private investment, not inherited from geography alone. Its military burden remains low and stable, in a year when military spending across much of the world rose to its highest level since 2009.

Crucially, Uruguay achieves this without sacrificing the institutional values this award seeks to honour. It is classified among the small group of full democracies worldwide, with civil liberties and electoral integrity rated among the strongest of any nation outside the traditional Nordic leaders, and it maintains a long tradition of peaceful, constitutional transfers of power.

This combination — a near-fully decarbonised grid, restrained military spending, and a robust democracy with a clean human-rights record — is exactly what the Leadership for Peace award was created to illuminate. It is awarded not to any individual or government of the day, but to the nation and its people, in recognition of a policy of state sustained across successive administrations of different political colours. As a demonstration that a country can prioritise climate infrastructure over armament without compromising its freedoms, the Oriental Republic of Uruguay receives this recognition.