Future socio-economic development plays a crucial role in both climate policy and the impacts of climate change. In this study, we for the first time systematically compare the costs of mitigation, adaptation, and residual damage for different socio-economic and climate scenarios known as the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). For this, we combine recent damage estimates… Continue reading Comparing mitigation, adaptation and residual damage costs under different socio-economic and climate scenarios

As part of the preparation for the What Works Climate Summit, a series of meetings was held, one of which was organised and sponsored by the Pathfinder team at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The meeting discussed harmonising reporting, supporting evidence uptake, and helping develop global capacity in evidence synthesis. This presentation will… Continue reading Recommendations and key messages from WWCS climate and health workshop for policy makers

As part of the Pathfinder Initiative, a systematic umbrella review was conducted of evidence from implemented actions and modelling studies of climate mitigation actions on green-house gas and health outcomes. We present what we did, what we found and what we plan to do with the findings for influencing policy and research.

Climate change is one of the biggest threats currently facing humanity. It is a is a global threat to stability. With its impacts in the form of extreme weather events and rising water body levels, climate change exposes present and future generations to lifelong health and livelihood harm, particularly in regions with low adaptive and… Continue reading Supporting the evaluation and evidence synthesis landscape in climate and health in low- and middle-income countries

As part of the Pathfinder Commission, a systematic umbrella review was conducted which synthesised disparate evidence on health and green-house gas (GHG) emissions resulting from climate change mitigation modelling. We observed discrepancy in conduct and reporting of these studies across interventions and contexts, which often required assumptions to be made when synthesising those estimates. This… Continue reading Guidelines of best practice climate and health modelling. The GReenhouse Gas And Health Modelling Studies (GRAHMS) Checklist.

In funding research in the climate and health field, economic evaluation has come up as critical evidence that policymakers need to identify and develop effective policy for climate and health. However, there are gaps in research capacity to deliver the evidence needed. Most economists either work on health or climate/environment economic analysis and they are… Continue reading Developing guidelines for economic evaluation of the health impacts of climate (in)action, enabling a consistent, comparable approach

Despite the importance of ambitious policy action for addressing climate change, large and systematic assessments of public policies and their design are lacking as analysing text manually is labour-intensive and costly. In a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and ETH Zurich, we made a first step in contributing to overcoming this bottleneck:… Continue reading Towards understanding policy design through text-as-data approaches: The policy design annotations (POLIANNA) dataset

In this study, we introduce a Bayesian approach to detect structural breaks in panel data in the context of step-shift indicator saturated models. We focus on identifying the magnitude of the impact of climate policies with uncertain timing. Traditional methods for climate policy evaluation often rely on precise knowledge of when interventions occur, comparing outcomes… Continue reading Bayesian Structural Break Detection for the Identification of Effective Climate Policies

While the role of innovation in the green transition is widely acknowledged, ex-post evaluations of policy instruments and policy mixes are limited to a few headline policy instruments. In this paper, we use patent family data from 22 countries for the years 2000 to 2019, covering 95% of total green patenting activity, and combine a… Continue reading Attributing Increases in Green Patenting to Disruptive Climate Policies

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. Here, we provide the first global, systematic ex-post evaluation identifying policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six… Continue reading Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades

Formulating and implementing climate policy requires a detailed understanding of likely pathways of future carbon emissions. However, most existing tools to provide forecasts for such emissions exhibit several limitations. Projections are predominantly made for the long-term, lacking the necessary detail within the typical policy horizon of one to five years. Moreover, most short-term forecasting models… Continue reading Building Open-Source Empirical Models to Forecast Carbon Emissions

Numerous city governments around the world have positioned themselves as “leaders” in efforts to deal with climate change. Although valuable, these efforts require scaling in order to achieve the needed impact. Here, we argue that horizontal scaling, i.e. the diffusion of ambitious climate action across cities, will benefit from appropriate city typologies. Typologies can foster… Continue reading Scaling urban climate action through archetypes: a city-matching approach