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For climate change mitigation, the beginning of the 2020s represents a crucial moment. National climate targets, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are updated for the first time. Simultaneously, countries introduce vast COVID-19 economic recovery packages to entrench or upset the current carbon-intensive economic system.
This project on the coincidence of these developments offers two novel insights. First, it will help us empirically understand the climate ambition of both NDC updates and COVID-19 recovery packages, as well as their coherence. Second, it will uncover the political and economic drivers underlying differences in climate ambition across countries.
This study will try to respond to two questions:
This study will integrate political science and economics, focusing on the role of policy feedback and financing conditions in driving climate ambition. It will also combine descriptive statistical analyses with qualitative comparative case studies in three analytical tasks in a mixed-methods research design.
First, it will leverage novel NDC and COVID-19 recovery data to sort countries into a typology based on the level of ambition between the two packages. It will classify them into four categories: symbolic climate leaders, substantive leaders, laggards, and crisis opportunists. It will then examine drivers of variation across these countries, focusing on policy feedback from national green coalitions. Finally, it will analyze the role of international financial institutions (IFI) as a moderating factor in shaping the climate ambition of NDCs and COVID-19 recovery packages.
Beyond academic insights, this project will deliver policy recommendations for national policymakers and IFIs on how to increase climate ambition.
The beginning of the 2020s is a critical moment for climate action for two reasons. First, starting in 2020, countries submitted their first updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), outlining their climate targets. The ambitions of the updated NDCs will provide an early measure of whether the Paris Agreement’s ratcheting-up mechanism – one of the key elements of the agreement – are working. On the other hand, the global COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent considerable COVID-19-related fiscal stimulus packages represent a critical juncture for climate change mitigation. For researchers, the fact that the NDC updates coincides with COVID-19 stimulus plans provides a unique opportunity to assess whether countries’ long-term ambitions in NDCs are aligned with the “ad hoc implementation” of climate ambition in stimulus packages. The (non-)alignment of short-term action with long-term stated goals had not been sufficiently analyzed in the existing literature and is therefore at the core of this project.
Our project exploits the simultaneous overlap of the first global NDC update and the pandemic fiscal responses to contribute to our understanding of the challenges policymakers face in closing the emissions gap, the role of the multilateral development banks, and functioning of the international climate finance architecture in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. The project is organized along three main research tasks.
Mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts are one of the biggest challenges facing policymakers. In 2015, world leaders adopted the Paris Agreement to keep global temperatures ideally below 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, based on the climate targets in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), countries are falling short of this ambitious goal. Despite the commitment to update NDCs every five years with higher climate ambitions, whether policymakers adopt and implement ambitious targets depends largely on a wide range of economic, political, and social factors. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent fiscal spending have been championed as an opportunity to drive green economic recovery and contribute to the global fight against climate change, for example by investing in clean energy and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies. This research project exploits the simultaneous overlap of the first global NDC update and the pandemic fiscal responses to contribute to our understanding of the challenges policymakers face in closing the emissions gap, the decarbonization potential of the multilateral development banks, and functioning of the international climate finance architecture in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement.
Tobias S. Schmidt
Coordinator
ETH Zurich
Anna Stünzi
Co-Coordinator
University of St-Gallen
Nicolas Schmid
Principal Member
ETH Zurich
Florian Egli
Principal Member
ETH Zurich
Jonas Meckling
Principal Member
UC Berkeley
Taryn Fransen
Principal Member
UC Berkeley
Ivetta Gerasimchuk
Principal Member
International Institute for Sustainable Development
Chris Beaton
Principal Member
International Institute for Sustainable Development
Swiss Network for
International Studies