Abstract
The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate governance that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change. Often, these documents contain headline greenhouse gas percentage reduction targets that appear to summarize countries’ contributions to mitigation. This is a boon for comparative climate policy research. However, I show in this paper that the Paris pledges require detailed interpretation to be comparable. I demonstrate the risks in comparing these targets by re-visiting a recent studying linking national public opinion to the stringency of countries’ mitigation goals. I develop new indicators that better account for the structure of the targets and show in replications that the original finding is inconsistent with the underlying data. I conclude by drawing lessons for studying the Paris pledges.
Highlights
The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate politics that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change
The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate governance that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change. These documents contain headline greenhouse gas percentage reduction targets that appear to summarize countries’ contributions to mitigation. This is a boon for comparative climate policy research
This study finds that countries with higher public awareness of climate change adopted more stringent greenhouse gas (GHG) targets in the Paris Agreement than countries with lower public awareness of climate change, controlling for a number of covariates
Summary
The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate politics that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change. The choice of reference GHG emissions levels has enormous consequences for actual GHG emissions flows under the Paris Agreement and measuring each country’s contribution to mitigating climate change. This point about measuring mitigation in INDCs would be purely semantic were it not distorting climate research. The indicators do not address the distributional implications or equitable mitigation across countries Instead, they purge opportunistic choices of reference levels that allow governments to declare large percentage cuts while pledging minor changes in absolute emissions. They purge opportunistic choices of reference levels that allow governments to declare large percentage cuts while pledging minor changes in absolute emissions In this sense, they re-focus measurement on emissions flows and remove elements of political communication from target-setting. If the Paris Agreement is a new model for future international cooperation, negotiators and academics should be aware of this challenge to measuring and comparing cooperative efforts
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