Photo Credit: unsplash/Aaron Burdon
Research on climate policy is growing exponentially. Of around 85,000 individual studies ever published that shed light on policy instruments to combat global warming, a good quarter are from 2020 or newer. Using machine learning methods, a study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in the journal npj Climate Action now shows how this vast knowledge is distributed - by instrument, country, sector and policy level - and what is "under-researched".
A "living systematic map" is available on the internet to guide scientists and politicians and will be continuously updated to reflect the latest research.
"We are not directly concerned here with the impact of climate policies - but with providing an overview of what has been scientifically investigated to date," explains Max Callaghan, PIK researcher and lead author of the study. "On the one hand, the overview provided here highlights the existing gaps in knowledge for research and research funding and thus worthwhile topics for new scientific work. On the other hand, it facilitates research synthesis, i.e. the preparation of the state of knowledge for governments, for example in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."
Among other things, the study shows that climate protection policies in the two countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions, China and the USA, have been researched particularly intensively. Africa, on the other hand, still has a lot of room for new findings, and the ratio of research work to implemented policies is lowest there. The study also identifies a research gap for some smaller countries with particularly impressive emission reductions, namely Greece, Denmark and Iceland.
Warning of "blind spots"
When analysing policy instruments, it becomes clear that economic instruments and CO2 pricing in particular receive a lot of attention in research, but that there is a research backlog around the world when it comes to regulatory instruments such as standards or bans. The study warns of "blind spots", for example with regard to the complementary benefits of such instruments when used in combination with pricing instruments. The industrial sector is also lagging behind in terms of research: it accounts for 23 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and 13 per cent of implemented climate protection policies, but only 8 per cent of research.
To cope with the enormous number of individual studies, the research team used so-called machine learning models. These intelligent big data tools are first "trained" with a learning algorithm using a manageable number of texts - and then automatically look at key text passages to extract the relevant information. Based on over one million potentially relevant studies, as a result of a query in the Open Alex science database, these big data tools identified the 85,000 or so studies that were actually relevant and used them to generate the map of climate policy research (https://climateliterature.org/#/project/policymap).
Aiming for a knowledge database for climate solutions
"With this study and the associated interactive web tool, we are taking an important step towards providing quick and accurate answers to the climate crisis," says Jan Minx, another PIK researcher and a co-author of the study. "Our research map is constantly updated and provides a real-time snapshot of available knowledge. It is the basis for an even more ambitious project: a Climate Solutions Evidence Bank, i.e. a knowledge database for climate solutions - which then summarises the knowledge for policymakers on which climate measures work." Thousands of climate policies have already been introduced, from CO2 taxes to e-car subsidies, says Minx: "Now the key question is to answer what works in which context, and to do this in real time, automatically updated with the help of artificial intelligence in the light of new studies."
Silvia Rausch-Becker Redakteurin
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