scholarly journals Are policymakers responsive to public demand in climate politics?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Lena Maria Schaffer ◽  
Bianca Oehl ◽  
Thomas Bernauer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Empirical Measures ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Change Mitigation ◽  
Public Demand

Abstract Normative theories of democracy agree that public demand should be the main guide in policymaking. But positive theories and related empirical research disagree about the extent to which this holds true in reality. We address this debate with an empirical focus on climate change policy. Specifically, we are interested in whether observable variation in public demand for climate change mitigation can help explain variation in adopted national climate policies. Using our own data to approximate public demand, we estimate the responsiveness of policymakers to changes in public demand in six OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. We find that policymakers are responsive and react in predicted ways to variation in our opinion component of measured public demand, rather than to the mere salience of the climate issue. The effect of issue salience is strongest in combination with our opinion measure as this creates a scope for action. The results underscore the importance and usefulness of our concept and empirical measures for public demand, as well as of our disaggregated analysis of climate policy outputs in this area.

Climate Change Triage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah M. Sachs
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Emergency Medicine ◽  
International Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Change Mitigation

Climate change is the first global triage crisis. It is caused by the overuse of a severely limited natural resource—the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases—and millions of lives depend on how international law allocates this resource among nations.This Article is the first to explore solutions for climate change mitigation through the lens of triage ethics, drawing on law, philosophy, moral theory, and economics. The literature on triage ethics—developed in contexts such as battlefield trauma, organ donation, emergency medicine, and distribution of food and shelter—has direct implications for climate change policy and law, yet it has been overlooked by climate change scholars. The triage lens rules out climate policies—including the current emissions path—that will lead to catastrophic warming, and it puts options on the table that are marginalized in the current United Nations negotiations on a climate change agreement.This Article examines three allocation principles that could potentially apply in climate change triage—utilitarianism, egalitarianism, and a market-based distribution—and it concludes that egalitarianism is the preferable allocation principle from the standpoint of ethics and international law. This Article ends by exploring four major policy implications that emerge from viewing climate change through the lens of triage.

Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Support for Climate Policies in Asia: Evidence from Recent Polls

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
So Young Kim
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Global Coordination ◽  
Change Mitigation ◽  
Cross National

Climate change has become a focal point in recent environmental debates and policymaking. Latest polls show rising consensus among the global public on the urgency of the problem. Home to the fastest growing economies as well as to four of the ten largest greenhouse gas emitters, Asia holds key to successful global coordination on climate change policy. This essay draws a contour of Asian public opinion on climate change issues based on multiple cross-national polls. While generally aware of climate change and seriously concerned about its effects, Asians turn out to be the least willing to bear the costs of climate change mitigation as compared to the residents of other regions of the world. This portends a great hurdle to devising and implementing proactive policies to address the challenges of climate change in the region.

Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics?

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-136
Author(s):  
Gustaf Arrhenius ◽  
Mark Budolfson ◽  
Dean Spears
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Policy Evaluation ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Policy Response ◽  
Population Ethics ◽  
Impossibility Results ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Population Axiology

Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal literature involving impossibility theorems has demonstrated that all possible approaches to population axiology have one or more seemingly counterintuitive implications. This leads to the worry that because axiological theory is radically unresolved, this theoretical ignorance implies serious practical ignorance about what climate policies to pursue. This chapter offers two deflationary responses to this worry. First, it may be that given the actual facts of climate change, all axiologies agree on a particular policy response. In this case, there would be a clear dominance conclusion, and the puzzles of axiology would be practically irrelevant (albeit still theoretically challenging). Second, despite the impossibility results, the authors prove the possibility of axiologies that satisfy bounded versions of all of the desiderata from the population axiology literature, which may be all that is needed for policy evaluation.

scholarly journals Discourses on sustainable forest management and their integration into climate policies in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-181
Author(s):  
C. Ofoegbu ◽  
C. Ifejika Speranza
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Forest Management ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Forest Policy ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Four Discourses ◽  
Change Mitigation

In South Africa, forests can play an important role in achieving the broader goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, national policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation seem to narrow the potential contributions of the forest sector to climate protection targets. This is largely because of the divergence between the management goals of forests for climate protection, and products for both industries and livelihoods. This article uses discourse analysis as a methodological tool to analyze South Africa's climate and forest policies to identify the discourses shaping forest policy goals and mandates, and their integration into climate policy targets for forest-based climate change interventions. Four discourses, namely, preservation of forest integrity, social inclusiveness, equitable benefit sharing, and inclusive development of forests and forest-based communities, were identified as the dominant discourses influencing forest policy goals in South Africa. Their influence on forest management programmes has a mix of costs and benefits outcomes. For example, policy responses to the discourse on the preservation of forest integrity have resulted in ecologically sustainable forests in some cases and in other cases restricted the participation of local people in forest enterprise development. Additionally, climate policies recognized six possible interventions with respect to forest-based climate change mitigation and adaptation in South Africa but were silent about the four discourses shaping forest policy goals. Consequently, existing climate policies do not contain regulations to guide forest management for climate change mitigation and adaptation. We therefore recommend that forest-related goals in climate policy be grounded in the past experiences and lessons of forest policy implementations in order to take advantage of the synergies and reduce the trade-offs with respect to multipurpose management of forests for livelihoods, enterprise development, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

scholarly journals Coco-Power: Exploring Copra-Derived Biodiesel for Grid Connected Electricity in Vanuatu

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy George Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Feasibility Assessment ◽  
Financial Feasibility ◽  
Open Discourse ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
International Climate ◽  
Carbon Finance ◽  
Change Mitigation

<p>This research assesses the financial feasibility of a large scale copra-based biodiesel refinery in Vanuatu and whether any carbon finance could be sought to improve the viability of the project. The research cannot be perfectly predictive of the next fifteen years of financial situation, however, the research can quite accurately replicate the feasibility assessment that potential investors would make. The research finds that the project is not financially viable under current projections without carbon finance. The research also shows that carbon finance could be sought from a number of sources in order to make the project feasible. Under current projections the research finds that utilising the clean development mechanism would add approximately 2.9 million United States Dollars (USD) to the present value of the project. The conclusion from these results is that the proposed biodiesel project is sufficiently profitable to attract investors. The primary recommendation resulting from the research is that the stakeholders to the proposed biodiesel project begin an open discourse to work through any issues in order to develop a sustainable copra-based biodiesel refinery in Vanuatu to produce a substitute for the import of fossil diesel used for electricity generation in Port Vila. The secondary recommendation is that international climate change policy negotiators should keep in mind the full set of barriers when addressing the uptake of clean technology in developing countries; often it may not only be the financial feasibility that is preventing climate change mitigation activities.</p>

scholarly journals Energy efficiency in the Dutch residential sector: reflections on policy implementation

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hoppe ◽  
Sandra Bellekom ◽  
Kris Lulofs
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Co2 Reduction ◽  
Major Objective ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Change Mitigation ◽  
Emission Of Greenhouse Gases

A major objective of Dutch energy programmes and strategies is the reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases, especially CO2. The CO2 reduction target currently being pursued by The Netherlands is 2% annually by 2020 below 1990 levels. Climate change mitigation has been receiving political attention in The Netherlands for a long time, resulting in a particularly close incorporation of energy programmes and measures into a comprehensive, long-term Dutch climate change policy programme, which started in 1998 after the country signed the Kyoto treaty. 

The politics of climate change in a neo-developmental state: The case of South Korea

2020 ◽  
pp. 019251212092474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kalinowski
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
Green Technology ◽  
Greenhouse Gas Mitigation ◽  
Green Technologies ◽  
Climate Policies ◽  
Global Leader ◽  
Change Mitigation

South Korea is the seventh largest emitter of CO2 and its climate-change mitigation policies are clearly insufficient. At the same time, the country has been very ambitious in implementing industrial policies promoting green technologies and international initiatives to support greenhouse gas mitigation in developing countries. What explains this discrepancy between weak emission goals and strong investments in green technology as well as ambitions to become a green ‘global leader’? This article argues that the specific character of Korean climate policies can be understood in the context of Korea’s legacy as a developmental state characterized by strong corporatist links between state and business as well as a weak civil society.

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