Around five years ago now there was an explosion of net zero declarations. After years of stalling and ‘I will if you will’ negotiations, suddenly a string of countries were prepared to commit. Climate emergencies were declared across governments, cities and businesses.
Setting a target is only step one of course. After that you need a plan, a set of policies that will reduce carbon emissions. Then you need to deliver on that plan, and it’s only then that we begin to see carbon pollution fall.
People advocate for their favourites, but there are lots of approaches to reducing emissions. There’s a whole menu of potential solutions to choose from. There are market based approaches that attempt to price in carbon costs and then let market forces guide the process. You might prefer behaviour change incentives, issuing grants and tax breaks to nudge citizens in the right direction. ‘Command and control’ approaches set limits, enforce standards, or phase out polluting technologies.
Given the urgency of climate breakdown, it’s important to choose well. We don’t want to spend years on a policy approach that turns out to be a dead end.
After a quarter century of climate policies around the world, there is now enough data to give us some clues about works and what doesn’t. A recent study in the Science journal looked at 1,500 climate policies enacted across 41 different countries over the last 25 years, and attempted to establish which ones were successful. I’ll let you look up the methodology if you’re interested, but it’s quite clever – using machine learning to look for noticeable breaks in emissions trends, and seeing if they can be matched with policy interventions.
What did they discover?
The bad news is that most climate policies didn’t visibly work. Or to use the researchers’ own words, “their impact on emissions has so far been highly uncertain”. Of 1,500 policies, “large emission reductions have materialized in only 69 cases.” That’s a pretty low hit rate.
The good news is that there are policies that do deliver. There have been more successful interventions in buildings than any other sector, and then transport and industry. There are good examples from developing and developed countries alike.
If we’re looking for a simple to-do list based on what worked, then the research is going to disappoint. One of its most important findings is that climate policies tend to work best in a wider programme.
Let’s take an under-appreciated UK policy as an example. The report namechecks the Carbon Price Floor, introduced in 2013 when George Osborne was chancellor. It’s the most successful climate policy of the Conservatives’ time in government, changing the economics of coal power and driving it off the grid. Because it’s technical and industry focused, most voters don’t know anything about it.
A large part of what made the carbon price floor successful is that it was part of a wider set of policies. Britain promoted renewable energy at the same time as restricting coal and raising standards on air pollution. These each might have led to falling carbon emissions on their own, but they were much more effective together.
The study found that some policy approaches only worked when they were in combination with other measures, and showed no impact in isolation. Information based policies (such as carbon footprint labeling, for example) were one of these – they don’t reduce emissions on their own. The same goes for subsidies in developing countries. We have to regulate or tax the technologies we don’t want as well as well as encouraging the ones we do.
Another wrinkle is that there’s no one-size-fits-all policy prescription. The report shows how development contexts affect what works and what doesn’t. Bans were more effective in developing countries. Subsidies work better – they don’t work on their own in richer countries, but they do elsewhere.
What can we conclude then, in the absence of a nice neat list? For starters, we should be sceptical of silver bullet solutions and campaigns with one big idea. I think most of us know that already. The big lesson from this study, in my opinion, is to look for synergies: policies that reinforce each other and amplify the positive effects. There are no easy answers. Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and stabilising the climate will take thoughtful and holistic programmes of climate policies.
The Earthbound Report 