Austrian climate policies and GHG-emissions since 1990: What is the role of climate policy integration?

Abstract

In 1990 Austria has committed to the Kyoto-protocol and later to the Paris Agreement. Since then, it has developed two climate strategies, has passed its first climate protection act, has adopted a strategy for adaptation to climate change and has implemented many new institutions, programmes and local to provincial climate change mitigation (CCM) measures. Indeed, Austrian GHG-emissions have been decreasing since 2005, giving reasons to suspect policy success. A closer analysis, however, challenges this impression. Here, we put climate policies since 1990 into perspective with other, often short-term drivers of GHG-emissions. Employing a conceptual framework, we evaluate the level of climate policy integration, which has been found key for successful climate policies in literature. This framework also helps us to detect benefits and shortcomings of past and existing CCM policies and so to derive insights relevant for policy-makers. We find that short-term climatic and socio-economic events overruled climate policies in their proximate GHG-emission effects, even when policies were implemented due to EU regulation after 2007. Policy effects are much more difficult to uncover, because they often happen within longer time-frames and are usually accompanied by indirect CCM-effects. In the background of accelerating climate change impacts in combination with associated high uncertainties, strengthening climate policies and integrating reflexive mechanisms that allow adjusting and continuously re-evaluating policy effectiveness, will become ever more important. Eliminating inconsistencies between CCM- and other sectoral policies and drastically reforming accounting schemes to include carbon leakage effects are particularly timely, yet considering political realities, very bold but necessary next step to make climate goals attainable.