Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from national climate legislation
By S. Eskander, Sam Fankhauser. Nature Climate Change, 2020
352 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The international response to climate change has been inadequate, but not zero. There are 1,800 climate change laws worldwide. We use panel data on legislative activity in 133 countries over the period 1999–2016 to identify statistically the short-term and long-term impact of climate legislation. Each new law reduces annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 0.78% nationally in the short term (during the first three years) and by 1.79% in the long term (beyond three years). The results are driven by parliamentary acts and by countries with a strong rule of law. In 2016, current climate laws were associated with an annual reduction in global CO2 emissions of 5.9 GtCO2, more than the US CO2 output that year. Cumulative CO2 emissions savings from 1999 to 2016 amount to 38 GtCO2, or one year’s worth of global CO2 output. The impact on other greenhouse gases is much lower. Climate change laws are shown to reduce national CO2 emissions by 0.78% in their first three years and 1.79% in the longer term. These reductions add up to 38 GtCO2 of avoided emissions for 1999–2016—equal to a year of CO2 emissions.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f154839a203c86ee1b9b4bd9e521dfe124996880
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Citations in the corpus
- Does a Carbon Tax Reduce CO2 Emissions? Evidence from British Columbia (2019, methodology): “Porter and Yu 2015, or Hansen 2017), however, has not been used in panels to detect treatment. In time series for example, in early work, Perron (1989) detects breaks in GNP time series attributable to the Great Depression and an oil price shocks. More recently, Hendry (2018) employs a break detecti”
- Institutions, Climate Change, and the Foundations of Long-Term Policymaking (2019, background): “Governments around the world have adopted 1800 climate laws and counting (Eskander & Fankhauser, 2020).”