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The Ambition Trap: How Overpromising on Climate Action Could Undermine the Paris Agreement

Under cross-pressure to pledge ambitious emission cuts and deliver concrete policy action, climate policymakers must navigate the tension between ambition and implementation prospects. Achieving the Paris Agreement’s long-term targets is possible …

Macroeconomic crises and green recovery spending: Introducing the CLIMREC dataset

The CLIMREC Dataset on Green Economic Recovery Spending offers new insights into the emissions profiles of 40 major economies’ economic recovery packages during the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyses reveal that most …

Commitment Ambiguity and Ambition in Climate Pledges

The Paris Agreement on climate change is built around a pledge-and-review system, wherein countries submit nationally determined pledges of mitigation commitments. While the agreement’s flexible design has attracted broad participation, its lenient …

Economic recessions and decarbonisation: analysing green stimulus spending in Canada and the US

Existing research has demonstrated that government policies often prioritise growth over climate during economic downturns. Yet government stimulus spending during economic downturns also offers an opportunity for decarbonisation through long-term …

Can Transparency Strengthen the Legitimacy of International Institutions? Evidence from the UN Security Council

Can transparency enhance the legitimacy of international institutions? As transparency has become a widely applied procedural standard in international politics, a range of institutions have implemented transparency reforms under the presumption that …

Mobilizing non-state actors for climate action through the global stocktake

Non-state actors play an essential role in the fabric of global climate governance. Here we propose four tailored strategies that non-state actors can mobilize to advance climate action among states and harness the potential of the global stocktake.

The Relative Effectiveness of Overlapping International Institutions: EU versus UN Regulations of Air Pollution

Which types of international institutions display higher ability to change states’ behavior? This article assesses the relative environmental effectiveness of a management-based (‘soft’) and an enforcement-based (‘hard’) international agreement: the …

Participation, ambition and compliance: can the Paris Agreement solve the effectiveness trilemma?

An effective climate agreement should simultaneously foster broad participation, high ambition, and sufficient compliance: this is the ‘effectiveness trilemma’. While the Paris Agreement has been acclaimed for spurring universal participation, its …

The domestic politics of international climate commitments: which factors explain cross-country variation in NDC ambition?

Under the Paris Agreement, parties self-determine their mitigation ambition level by submitting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Extant assessments find that the collective ambition of current pledges is not line with the Agreement's goals …

Fairness conceptions and self-determined mitigation ambition under the Paris Agreement: Is there a relationship?

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between countries’ expressed concerns with fairness and the ambition levels in their pledged contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, asking the following questions: 1) Are the NDCs of countries …