A composite assessment of the stringency of national climate and low-carbon energy policies

Abstract

The Paris Agreement requires countries to put in place climate change actions in line with the objective to keep the increase of the global temperature well below 2°C, with efforts to stay below 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. It is, therefore, of crucial importance to track and evaluate the policies and measures that national governments are implementing toward these objectives. New initiatives recently started to emerge to keep track of climate actions over time, covering various spatial and thematic areas. They also offer different levels of detail about climate policy measures, including both qualitative and quantitative information. This study aims at gathering quantitative information from publicly available databases to monitor the progress of emission reduction policy measures, focusing on six main dimensions: policy density, carbon pricing, fossil fuel subsidy removal, energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy research and development (R&D) as aspects of interest for the research. These will be used as the framework for a comparison across countries of the stringency of their climate and low-carbon energy policies. The approach will be based on the construction of a composite indicator, namely the ACTION Index, which aggregates the six selected single indicators. Subsequently, the robustness of the proposed systematic measure will be tested through the comparison of results with the Environmental Policy Stringency scores published by the OECD. The whole analysis will contribute to identify and fill the gaps in the scientific literature regarding the main issues related to policy stringency evaluation and it will allow to propose guidelines for further improvement and research.