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. National policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions include a wide variety of instruments aimed at deploying low-carbon energy sources, decarbonizing industrial processes, as well as commercial and residential sectors. 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 are used as the framework for a comparison across countries of the stringency of their climate and low-carbon energy policies. The approach is 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 is tested through the comparison of results with the Environmental Policy Stringency scores published by the OECD. The research covers emission reduction policy efforts in 26 countries throughout 11 years, from 2010 to 2021. Findings show that the stringency of mitigation policy measures increased over the last decade, reporting an overall positive trend for all the countries under analysis. Individual performance varies greatly among countries, with Norway and other Northern European nations showing the highest scores of the ACTION Index and a positive evaluation in all dimensions of climate policy considered. On the opposite side, Mexico is the main laggard, reporting the lowest score mainly due to inconsistent policy decisions and changes that, although an ini5al increment, contributed to the poor performance of the country in some dimensions such as carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy removal. On the whole, breaking down the ACTION Index into its components allows to delve into national dynamics with a finer eye: this part of the research uncovers remarkable heterogeneity, offering a granular evaluation of the factors driving the overall composite measure and those contributing the least. These results highlight the importance of implementing comprehensive climate policy mixes, addressing together major sources of emissions, key polluting sectors and inefficient economic incentives.
Methodologically, the analysis confirms that assessing and comparing the stringency of national emission reduction efforts is a daunting task, challenged by limited data availability as well as by the variety and complexity of climate policy tools to be considered. This notwithstanding, the advancements proposed by the ACTION Index in terms of broader geographic and climate policy coverage compared to previous studies, 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 translate scientific evidence into thought-provoking policy recommendations and interesting guidelines for further improvement and research.