A common list of country names

Having a standardized list of country names is an important prerequisite for region definitions, scenario analysis and model comparison.

The nomenclature package (read the docs) builds on the pycountry package to provide a standardized list of country names based on the ISO 3166-1 standard.

For consistency with established conventions in the modelling community, several country names are shortened compared to ISO 3166-1, e.g. from “Bolivia, Plurinational State of” to “Bolivia”. See the full list of changes on GitHub.

Also, “Kosovo” is added (with alpha_3 code “KOS”, following the IOC), even though it is not a universally recognized state and not oficially included in ISO 3166-1.

You can access the list of countries via the model-registration Excel template or via the Python API.

The nomenclature package also provides utility functions to work with the country-names and easily translate between country names and alpha-3/alpha-2 codes (also known as ISO3 and ISO2 codes). Here is an example:

from nomenclature import countries

# list of country names
countries.names

# mappings between alpha_3 (ISO3), alpha_2 and country names
name = countries.get(alpha_3="...").name
alpha_3 = countries.get(name="...").alpha_3
alpha_2 = countries.get(name="...").alpha_2