There has been growing interest among researchers and policymakers in comparing or benchmarking countries on the basis of their performance in energy consumption or energy-related CO2 emissions. Such studies allow variations among countries to be revealed, the contributing factors identified, and the scope for improvement better understood. At the same time, tracking changes or quantifying improvements in energy use or emissions over time in a country have long been a focus area of researchers and policy makers. To provide a fuller picture on country performance in a multi-country study over time, it would be of interest to integrate the above-mentioned spatial and temporal analyses in a single analysis framework. This paper deals with this issue using the technique of index decomposition analysis. A spatial–temporal approach is introduced and two application cases are presented to illustrate how the approach can be applied. The first analyzes variations and changes in the aggregate CO2 intensity of electricity production for ten countries from 1990 to 2010, and the second deals with variations and changes in the aggregate energy intensity for eight economic regions of China from 2002 to 2012. In addition, two different ways of presenting the results are introduced. Our study shows that the proposed approach can supplement studies which are conducted purely on a spatial or temporal basis. •We introduce a ST-IDA model to integrate temporal and spatial decompositions.•Approaches to selecting reference region and time period are discussed.•We introduce two ways of presenting comparison results.•Two case studies are presented to illustrate the application of the ST-IDA model.