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Delivering sustainable climate action: reframing the sustainable development goals

Globally, climate change represents the most significant threat to the environment and socio-economic development, endangering lives and livelihoods. Within the UN’s current 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate action is explicitly covered under Goal 13, “to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. This perspective considers how to re-frame the SDGs and their successor towards mainstreaming climate action within the targets and indicators of all the development goals.

Machine learning map of climate policy literature reveals disparities between scientific attention, policy density, and emissions

Current climate mitigation policies are not sufficient to meet the Paris temperature target, and ramping up efforts will require rapid learning from the scientific literature on climate policies. This literature is vast and widely dispersed, as well as hard to define and categorise, hampering systematic efforts to learn from it. We use a machine learning pipeline using transformer-based language models to systematically map the relevant scientific literature on climate policies at scale and in real-time. Our “living systematic map” of climate policy research features a set of 84,990 papers, and classifies each of them by policy instrument type, sector, and geography. We explore how the distribution of these papers varies across countries, and compare this to the distribution of emissions and enacted climate policies. Results suggests a potential stark under-representation of industry sector policies, as well as diverging attention between science and policy with respect to economic and regulatory instruments.

Theorising unconventional climate advocates and their relationship to the environmental movement

Environmentalist-identified advocates have contributed to high levels of public support for climate action across countries. However, there remain important holdout constituencies that theory and evidence suggest are less likely to be persuaded by environmentalists, especially constituencies associated with resources and economic production, rural and regional areas, masculine norms, and conservative belief systems and politics. Emerging from these holdout constituencies, though, are some novel advocates for climate action. In this paper we theorise ‘unconventional climate advocates’ as those who combine advocacy for climate action with a social identity that departs from the prototypical environmentalist identity. Using social network analysis we show that unconventional climate advocates in Australia are peripheral to the main environmental movement, that is, the conventional advocates for climate action. We contend that unconventional advocates can broaden the social base of support for climate action, and their independence from conventional advocates – environmentalists – may aid in their efforts.

Political enablers of ambitious climate policies: a framework and thematic review

Currently, most research explaining why countries lead or lag in climate policy assumes a problem-oriented perspective, focusing on barriers to climate policy adoption. Here, we argue that correcting for past failures, solving problems, and bringing climate policies back on track for the Paris Agreement requires a solution-oriented perspective on the political enablers of ambitious climate policies. We unite a growing research community that has previously been scattered across disciplinary subfields with various ontological and epistemological assumptions. Rooted in a thematic review of the scientific literature, we introduce a framework with a typology of six political enablers for ambitious climate policy at its core. For each enabler, we summarize key policy implications. We illustrate our framework with a case study on the adoption of emission trading systems in the transport and building sectors in Germany and the European Union (EU) allowing future solution-oriented research to build on our effort.

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