New DeepDCarb Publications - July 2022

In Climate Policy Ambition: Exploring A Policy Density Perspective, we measure climate policy density from 2000-2019 by drawing on three publicly available databases: Climate Change Laws of the World, Climate Policy Database and the Policies and Measures Database. All three measurements show an upward trend in the adoption of climate policy. However, our empirical comparison also reveals differences between the measurements with regard to the degree of policy expansion and sectoral coverage, which are due to differences in the type of policies in the databases. Since the choice of the database and the resulting measurement of policy density ultimately depend on the questions posed by researchers, we conclude by discussing whether some questions are better answered by some measurements than others.

The politicisation of climate change attitudes in Europe​ uses European Social Survey data to examine the links between climate change attitudes and voting in Europe.  It finds that - in Western Europe - not only are Green party voters more climate conscious and Populist-Right voters much less so, but that there are differences in climate attitudes between mainstream left and right voters that cannot be accounted for by left-right orientations and other political values. There is no consistent structure across Central and Eastern European countries.

The Changing Prioritization of Environmental Protection in Britain: 1982–2019 examines the evolution of long-term trends in the prioritization of environmental protection in Britain over a period of four decades. At the aggregate level, prioritization largely tracks changing economic conditions as well as key environmental events. At the individual level, educational attainment is the only consistently significant demographic correlate over time. The findings also provide evidence of increasing politicization of the environment, with left–right orientations only becoming an important correlate of environmental prioritization in recent years, in line with rising divergence on the issue at the elite level.