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Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades

Affiliations
  • 1Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Potsdam, Germany.
  • 2Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Berlin, Germany.
  • 3Institute of Physics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
  • 4IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany.
  • 5Climate Econometrics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • 6Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • 7Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • 8Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, France.
  • 9Department of Economics, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
  • 10Faculty of Economics and Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Published on:

August 22, 2024

Abstract

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. We provide a global, systematic ex post evaluation to identify policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents. Our approach integrates a comprehensive climate policy database with a machine learning-based extension of the common difference-in-differences approach. We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO. Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.

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