Scientists who evaluated more than 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries found that only 63 actually worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The fraction of policies that worked combined financial incentives, regulations and taxes, according to the study.
The OECD database, which identifies 46 types of policy interventions, revealed that government policymakers prefer subsidies and regulations.
The study, which only examined policies that had an impact within about two years of implementation, revealed that the 63 successful policy interventions in total reduced emissions by between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2.
The most successful of the policies included a mixture of policy tools to change consumer and corporate behaviour.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Nicolas Koch, senior researcher at the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and an author of the study, as saying: “The commonality in those successful cases is where we see subsidies and regulations being combined with price-based policy instruments. This means carbon pricing, and it could be energy taxes, it could be vehicle taxes.”
The study, published in the journal Science, used an AI algorithm to sift through a database of environmental prescriptions compiled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 1998 and 2020. These policies ranged from energy-efficient standards for household appliances to a carbon tax on fossil fuels like oil and gas.
[Image: digifly840 from Pixabay]