Climate change and climate policies around the world

To halt global warming, we need to design policies that ensure that we achieve this goal: we cannot rely only on individuals around the world to voluntarily reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In the EU, a powerful policy has been decided on that will ensure that we will reach net zero emissions very rapidly in a way consistent with the Paris agreement. This policy will, however, force us away from using fossil fuel, potentially imposing large costs on our citizens. We must now urgently find ways to make this transition as efficient and fair as possible.

This requires a second round of policy instruments, no longer aimed at reducing emissions but aimed at making it possible to live with the sharp emission reductions.

The purpose of the present project is to analyze and compare a range of such policy instruments by constructing a large simulation model that is designed for “integrated assessment” of economics and climate change.

The model is global, because a key challenge is to understand how different policies around the world - in the rest of the world, nothing like the EU policy has been implemented yet – will affect outcomes.

A particular focus involves making sure that poor countries can survive the reductions in emissions that are also necessary there.

The present research team has already constructed a global model but it now needs to be developed significantly, bit by bit, to allow us to address the core policy questions one by one.