Climate Policy Databases: Understanding National Governments’ Progress in Achieving Paris Agreement Targets
By Soyoung Oh and Zdenka Myslikova
The central objective set by the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°, compared to pre-industrial levels, also required countries to create plans for action, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report notes that current NDCs are highly insufficient and make it likely that warming will exceed 1.5° while making it harder to limit warming to below 2° after 2030. The results of the next global stocktake will help governments understand the emissions gap in achieving the Paris Agreement goals and facilitate more ambitious NDCs in the next round of climate change deliberations.
Table 1. Global total GHG emissions in 2030 and the estimated emissions gap under different scenarios.
Source: UNEP (2022) Emissions Gap Report 2022
Tracking countries’ progress in designing, implementing, and enforcing their domestic policies is essential to determining whether the policies align with international commitments like the Paris Agreement. At Climate Policy Lab, we create comprehensive climate policy inventories to monitor progress towards national goals based on each country’s climate laws, policy instruments, and plans. We have already made available climate policy inventories for China, the United States, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, with inventories for Colombia, Türkiye, South Africa, and the Philippines forthcoming (see map below).
About the National Climate Policy Inventories
The climate policy inventories are a database of both direct and indirect climate policies across multiple sectors at the national level. They provide a one-stop reference point to track individual governments’ domestic policy efforts to mitigate, adapt, and build resilience against the dire consequences of climate change.
Figure 2. Countries currently inventoried by Climate Policy Lab
We have collected a broad range of climate policies and categorized them as follows:
economy-wide;
transportation;
power/energy;
agriculture and land use, forestry;
industrial and buildings, residential, energy efficiency, green cities.
Within each category, we distinguish among laws (acts of parliament that provide authority to climate policy instruments and enforcement of regulations), plans (overarching goals, directives/targets, agenda setting – e.g., national development plan), and policy instruments, whether fiscal (fiscal programs, taxes, feed-in-tariffs, green fund) or regulatory (performance standards, permitting and citing) or both. Our inventory captures domestic and national policies only. We are not currently inventorying international, foreign, or sub-national policies.
Further, the database includes policy goals, which are coded based on the country’s goals on mitigation, adaptation, resilience, climate finance, and climate innovation (i.e., R&D-related policies, technology demonstrations).
In addition, we summarize each policy’s objectives along with related policy start and end dates, referencing our sources. We also indicate whether they are direct or indirect climate policies. In our categorization, direct climate policies are tools created or adopted with the sole goal of addressing a climate change challenge (for example, South Africa’s 2011 National Climate Change Response Policy). Indirect climate policies are instruments with non-climate change objectives that nonetheless have climate change co-benefits (such as India’s Integrated Energy Policy).
Climate Policy Lab’s Policy Gap Analysis
Based on our climate policy inventories, we are conducting Climate Policy Lab’s Raising Ambition project, extending CPL’s Policy Gap Analysis methodology to major emerging economies to identify specific policy pathways for decarbonization. In our analysis for each country, we assess the effectiveness of current strategies and policies and identify a range of new policies that could supplement existing efforts to achieve deep decarbonization, while growing the economy and jobs.
Our latest work on India’s deep decarbonization efforts offers policy options to achieve India’s long-term ambition of net zero emissions by 2070 while addressing India’s socio-economic objectives of accelerating jobs and GDP growth (see CPL Policy Brief, journal article forthcoming). We show a scenario in which India achieves 70% below Business as Usual (BAU) by 2050, wherein the emissions intensity of GDP would fall 62% by 2030 (relative to 2005), which is significantly better than currently committed in India’s NDC.
Our 2019 publication assessed China’s climate targets and analyzed the likelihood of Chinese policies reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While the analysis identified several policy gaps, it found that China is likely to peak its carbon emissions before 2030, conditional on the full implementation of current policies and sectoral reforms including power and industry, as well as the national emissions-trading system (see Nature Communications article).
Notably, these two pieces have shown how deep decarbonization presents economic opportunities in the respective national contexts. The analyses for the remaining countries included in CPL’s climate policy inventories are forthcoming this year and in 2024.
We are continually updating these inventories and welcome your input. Please email Soyoung Oh.
Soyoung Oh is a Junior Research Fellow at the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.
Zdenka Myslikova is a Post-doctoral Scholar at the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.