Policy Elements
The Climate Laws, Institutions, Policies, and Practices (CLIPPS) Project

Recent studies suggest that robust climate policy reduces harmful emissions (Eskander and Frakhauser 2020) and promotes adaptation and resilience (D’Amico and Maboudi 2023). At the same time, scholars and policymakers acknowledge that international efforts have failed to keep climate change this century within the 1.5-degree Celsius goal (IPCC 2018). Yet, no existing measures of climate policy actually assess the contents of nations’ climate laws and policies, the quality of these policies, or even whether these are implemented. Instead, these climate policy measures are merely “count variables” recording whether a given nation has passed a type of climate law, and in what year. For example, the most complete “policy count” database, Grantham Institute’s Climate Change Laws of the World, counts laws and policies but not what these would accomplish if implemented, the scope of the law or policy, or likelihood of implementation. Other data sets, such as the World Bank’s Carbon Pricing Dashboard (2023) assess Effective Carbon Rates (ECR) but are available only for a subset of countries (mostly large emitters). The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI, Burck 2023) does measure nations’ climate policies, and uses a time series. But the CCPI does not disaggregate data by sectors offers only one aggregate measure and does not offer any national adaptation policy measures.

In the absence of studies dedicated to independently measuring the progress of nation-states in developing and implementing climate policy, the 2023 United Nations global stock take, a five-year assessment forming part of the UN’s Paris Agreement climate regime, was supposed to help serve this purpose. However, the stock take documents to date have relied on national government self-reporting and biennial updates without independent verification. The heavily anticipated global stock take on mitigation (UNFCC 2022a) offered no centralized technical guidance (such as the advisory documents offered by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change) regarding the level of policy stringency needed to manage climate change globally. Nor did it offer verification of whether nations implemented their modest and voluntary Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pledges or “whether and how” these voluntary national pledges could meaningfully impact decarbonization. The adaptation synthesis (UNFCCC 2022b) was even less authoritative, counting “mentions” of phenomena like sea level rise and expectations of increased temperatures in national NDCs and related communications. Beyond these disaster “counts,” there was no systematic mention in adaptation documents of specific nations’ policies.

How can worldwide efforts to assess climate law and policy be based on so little actual information? Without comprehensive and robust data to measure nations’ climate policies, empirical scholarship has used changes in a nation’s emissions as the dependent variable in studies seeking to assess climate policy stringency. A few studies have used the few other comparative data sets that are available as proxies for national climate

policies. For example, Finnegan (2022) used carbon pricing by nation-year as a dependent variable, Ko et al. (2022) used national carbon neutrality pledges by nation as a proxy, Sprinz and Tørstad (2023) used implementation timelines regarding whether nations “front-load” or “back-load” emissions reductions in projections, and Eisenstadt et al. (2024a) used the percentage of renewable energy in a nation’s power grid as a proxy for climate policy stringency. These studies are certainly more limited than studies which might feature more comprehensive measures of climate policy robustness, leading scholars to continuously call for more direct, comprehensive, and robust measures of national climate policy (see Eisenstadt and Lopez 2023 and Fransen et al. 2023).

Clearly, it is time to establish a robust data set of national climate policies independent of the UN and its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This project seeks to create the first such robust national climate policy data set, Climate Laws, Institutions, Policies and Practices in nation-States (CLIPPS). We will use this data to answer questions covering national policies of 80 nations on mitigation and adaptation issues. This collaboration between proven academics, an international steering committee of climate scholars and practitioners (listed in “Facilities” section), and hundreds of experts surveyed for broad knowledge on scores of policies, will establish a public data base measuring hundreds of indicators across more the 80 countries (the Phase I pilot for which we seek funding now). We will then use these indicators to address a set of research questions which have been unanswerable until now. The data will be published on accessible public portals like that of The World Bank, and researchers will launch the survey’s next wave, which will, by 2032, input even more powerful longitudinal data.

In both mitigation and adaptation, comprehensive data are needed. For mitigation, existing data do not systematically cover the economic sectors addressed by Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (energy, industry, transportation, buildings, agriculture and forests, and waste disposal) and for adaptation there is, of yet, no systematic data at all. We will systematize dozens of variables into the categories of climate disaster relief, long-term disaster planning, and long-term adaptation planning beyond natural disasters (see full list on p. 15). Most scholarship identifies adaptation as a local issue, but national legal and policy frameworks guide local decision-making, and national-level data will offer a strong start for understanding how communities are meeting the multifaceted challenges of adaptation.