The Stringency of Climate Legislation and Policy in the European Union and the 21OECD Countries, 1990-2020.

Abstract

Legislation and policies to mitigate climate change are an important part of the toolkit available to highly industrialized democracies to address climate change. However, our knowledge of the stock of legislation is far from perfect. There are some studies that count the number of laws and policies. But when it comes to a deeper analysis of the content of the measures, our knowledge is very limited. In this paper, I offer a way to measure important aspects of policy stringency (or, as it is often called, ambition, importance, relevance, significance, intensity) of legislative initiatives for macro-comparative studies using publicly available data. The paper examines three well-established datasets from the International Energy Agency, the Grantham Institute, and EcoLex/FaoLex for their representativeness and suitability for such an analysis. In particular, it uses the European Union's 2020 and 2030 climate and energy frameworks and the national and subnational legislation of 21 OECD countries. It shows that the EcoLex/FaoLex dataset is best suited to capture qualitative aspects of legislation. The paper develops indices for the relevance, scope and importance of legislation and policy measures, which are cumulated into an index of saliency and filly in a measure of the (gross) potential impact (GPI) of legislation at the national level.