Climate Change Acts: Origins, Dynamics, and Consequences

ABSTRACT

Framework legislation on climate change is coming of age. Ever more nation states and sub-state entities are passing Climate Change Acts (CCAs) – framework legislation that lays down general principles and obligations for climate change policymaking – and a number of early adopters are updating or replacing their initial legislation. This provides an opportune moment to bring together and move forward the scholarship on CCAs, examining where they have come from (their origins), how they work in practice (their dynamics), and what impacts they are having on the world and how it is organized (their consequences). The contributions to this Special Issue analyse the CCAs of Sweden, Mexico, New Zealand, Australian subnational governments, the UK, Denmark, Scotland and Austria as well as an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a Belgian CCA. Collectively, they add a wealth of new perspectives to the growing scholarship, identifying policy insights that can inspire further scholarship and future policy endeavours that can learn from these cases. The Special Issue contributions demonstrate that a number of contextual factors and elements of parliamentary process are important for successful passing of CCAs and/or high levels of ambition in the legislation itself. They highlight both the dangers and potential of policy fragmentation as dynamics of CCAs and the potential role for advisory bodies to shape these dynamics. Finally, consequences are identified in changes in political culture, parliamentary debate and the emergence of specific policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate Change Acts
• framework legislation
• origins
• dynamics
• consequences

As scientific, political and societal concern regarding climate change has grown in recent years, academic research has focused increasingly on legislative responses to climate change. This research has addressed a variety of questions, including: What legal frameworks exist? How are legal frameworks being passed? How do these new frameworks work in practice? And what impacts do these frameworks have on climate politics and policy, and ultimately on climate action, with progress measured by indicators such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adaptation responses? These questions are set against a background where an increasing number of countries are developing national climate legislation, not the least as a response to the Paris Agreement’s requirement for each signatory to prepare, communicate and maintain Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

This special issue addresses a particular form of climate change legislation – Climate Change Acts (CCAs). We adopt Nash and Steurer’s (2019, p. 1053) definition of CCAs as “framework legislation adopted by parliament that lays down general principles and obligations for climate change policymaking in a nation-state (or sub-state entity), with the explicit aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in relevant sectors through specific measures to be implemented at a later stage”. Our focus, therefore, is on the broad stroke frameworks that guide climate policy, rather than on specific policy measures. As frameworks that intend to provide stability against world events and protect climate policy goals from weakening when other policy priorities become the focus of attention, CCAs are an increasingly important part of the climate policy landscape.

The United Kingdom (UK) CCA, enacted in 2008, was the first nation state-level CCA of its kind and has received significant scholarly attention (e.g. Carter & Childs, 2018; Fankhauser et al., 2018; Lockwood, 2013; Lorenzoni & Benson, 2014; Muinzer, 2018). In the years since, ever more legislatures at the nation state and sub-state levels have introduced their own framework legislation to add stability to climate policy. Scholarship has focused on a range of case studies, including Scotland (McEwen & Bomberg, 2014; Nash, 2020), Ireland (Torney, 2017), Finland (Kymenvaara, 2015; Pölönen, 2014; Torney, 2019), and Austria (Tobin, 2017).

However, the literature on CCAs is still limited in both depth and breadth. Most analyses to date have been single case studies that focus on the legal content or emergence of CCAs, drawing on a limited range of theoretical perspectives, though some recent scholarship has attempted to identify broader trends in the adoption of climate change legislation and policies (Iacobuta et al., 2018) and their effects (Dubash, 2020). In terms of breadth, until recently the academic literature has been dominated by a focus on English-speaking legislatures in the Global North, and while analyses of other European legislatures have increased, the Global North bias continues to dominate. Notwithstanding, a growing number of developing countries are looking towards framework legislation as a means to tackle climate change. Fiji and Uganda passed national CCAs in 2021 outlining governmental responsibilities and procedures in the countries’ climate work. Similar, although with a certain amount of variation, framework laws have previously been introduced in, for example, Peru in 2020, Paraguay in 2017, Kenya in 2016, Pakistan in 2016, Nigeria and Micronesia (both 2013). As early as 2009, the Phillipines passed its Climate Change Act (RA 9729), which establishes the framework for climate change policy and the set up of a Climate Change Commission with a range of powers and functions (GRI, 2021).

The adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015 catalysed the development of framework climate legislation. A second generation of CCAs has seen the revision and replacement of pre-Paris CCAs that did not match the global temperature goals that the global agreement set out (Nash & Steurer, 2021a; Nash & Steurer, 2019).

In this Special Issue, we focus on the origins, dynamics, and consequences of CCAs. In particular, as a second generation of CCAs has now emerged, we need to not only detail the processes through which single CCAs have materialized, but also to study the dynamics of already established CCAs, studying how they work in practice and are applied or utilized over time. By drawing conclusions about how framework climate legislation works in practice, and also about elements of CCAs that are not working as envisioned, scholarship can inform future climate legislation. Furthermore, it is possible to begin to assess the consequences of CCAs that have been in force for multiple legislative periods. This is important as CCAs are not an end in themselves, but rather a tool to guide GHG emissions onto a long-term downward trajectory and bring predictable planning and implementation processes to climate policymaking.

Origins

The origins and emergence of CCAs have until now been a central focus of the literature. The emergence of the UK CCA and the particular role of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Friends of the Earth (FoE), for example, has been analysed in detail (Carter & Childs, 2018). Other contributions have examined the role of the UK CCA in the emergence of CCAs in other jurisdictions, either through diffusion (Torney, 2017) or competition (Nash, 2020). However, as more time passes, the importance of the UK CCA for driving policy change has begun to fade into the background. While it is still common practice to have visits of parliamentarians from other countries to the UK to learn from their experience (Karlsson, 2021) and to see parliamentary committees use documentation related to the UK CCA (Nash & Steurer, 2021b), a diverse range of other factors are influencing new legislation.

The emergence of CCAs is now increasingly tied to other developments in climate politics. First, the Paris Agreement provides a normative basis for CCAs, and has both motivated civil society to call for revised or replacement CCAs (Nash & Steurer, 2021b), and made it easier for politicians already in the legislative process to call for strong GHG emission reduction targets (Karlsson, 2021; Nash & Steurer, 2021a). Second, the European Green Deal and European Climate Law (European Commission, 2020) are likely to shape future CCA developments in a European context. The European Climate Law contains several of the elements common across national and sub-national CCAs, including GHG emission reduction targets, monitoring progress towards achieving them, and the creation of a scientific advisory body.

The literature on CCA origins focuses on legislatures where a CCA has been successfully passed, and it neglects ‘non-cases’ where CCA processes have begun but have not resulted in legislation being passed (Orsini, Cobut, & Gaborit, 2021). Studying such non-cases can help identify potential roadblocks to legislation. Furthermore, comparing cases of adoption of CCAs with cases of non-adoption can add new insights that identify, examine and compare the factors that contribute to CCAs being passed.

Dynamics

Researchers have also started to explore the political and legal significance of CCAs. While freshly minted CCAs can only really be judged on their procedural thoroughness and the ambition that they promise on paper, legislation that has entered force can be used to monitor governments’ progress and compliance. Studying the dynamics of CCAs can also provide insights into the general direction of climate policy, including whether climate goals are forward-looking and climate policy is integrated across government (Averchenkova et al., 2021a). CCAs often establish advisory institutions, and even if these institutions are designed to be independent, it is not always straightforward to separate their effects from those of parliaments, because much of the impact of advisory institutions comes through the ways in which policymakers use their advice and recommendations.

The dynamics of CCAs also extend beyond formal political settings and parliamentary institutions. CCAs can provide civil society actors with tools to pressure governments to increase climate policy ambition. In the UK, the NGO Client Earth has highlighted gaps in CCA implementation (Client Earth, 2016), alluding to the potential for legal action. In Germany, climate activists brought a case before the Federal Constitutional Court in 2021 based upon the claim that the German CCA contravenes fundamental rights. The complaint was partly upheld and the Federal Government was ordered by the court to strengthen the CCA (Bundesverfassungsgericht, 2021). In Ireland, the Supreme Court struck down the government’s statutory National Mitigation Plan as not being consistent with the government’s obligations under Ireland’s 2015 CCA (O’Neill & Alblas, 2020). Scholarship on CCAs is therefore likely to focus increasingly on the theme of climate litigation (Eskander et al., 2021).

Consequences

The consequences of CCAs are more difficult to discern, due to the challenges of establishing a causal relationship that directly links climate legislation to substantive climate outcomes such as GHG emission reductions. Rather than posing the question of whether CCAs have had direct effects to reduce GHG emissions levels, we can instead focus on CCA outputs rather than outcomes. Typical outputs include policies and instruments designed to help reach the goals set out in a CCA. These could range anywhere from schemes to assist individual households with emission-saving measures such as upgrading heating systems or improving insulation, through to large-scale overhauls of transport systems or energy production and supply. Therefore, we can ask whether CCAs have led to positive climate policy development in both rhetoric and practice, and whether climate mitigation measures have been enhanced as a result.

One consequence of CCAs has been the normative anchoring of climate targets at the centre of national climate policy and the subsequent increase in stringency of these targets through amendments to original legislation. Parliaments have changed targets for GHG emission reductions in the UK (“The Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order, 2019), Scotland (“Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act, 2019) and also in Denmark (Lov om klima, 2020), for example, through the introduction of new legislation. Future research should examine processes of CCA amendment or replacement; this can give an insight into how the presence of a CCA, as a normative and procedural framework, can provide a basis for demands to increase the ambition of targets and lead to amendments or updates (Nash & Steurer, 2021b). Furthermore, the implementation of a CCA can also be a driver for changing not only policies themselves, but also policy implementation, cross-sector coordination, as well as increasing the prioritization of the climate issue at the governmental level (Matti, Petersson, & Söderberg, 2021).

How and to what extent CCAs can deal effectively with instances of non-compliance has not featured significantly in the literature to date, but as more time elapses, non-compliance is likely to become a more prominent issue. We can make a useful distinction between procedural and substantive non-compliance, with CCAs likely well equipped to provide remedies to procedural non-compliance in particular. The Irish Supreme Court challenge of the National Mitigation Plan, mentioned above, is one such instance: an NGO successfully challenged the government’s climate plan on the basis that it did not fulfil the requirements specified in the CCA (O’Neill & Alblas, 2020). Whether CCAs can provide effective remedy for instances of substantive non-compliance – for example, understood as failure to meet specified emission reduction targets – is more open to debate. CCAs do not generally trigger any sanctions in the case of substantive non-compliance (Nash & Steurer, 2019) and it is unclear whether the political pressure of failing to deliver on binding targets will be a sufficient control mechanism to promote progress. Furthermore, any such remedy will come quite literally too late – because the emissions will have already been emitted and, in the case of CO₂ at least, will remain in the atmosphere for a timescale of centuries to millennia.

Overview of the Special Issue

The articles in this Special Issue cover a diversity of geographical regions, theoretical approaches and methodologies. We add breadth to the literature by adding new case studies to this literature from outside Europe, specifically Mexico (Solorio, 2021), New Zealand (Bailey, Fitch-Roy, Inderberg, & Benson, 2021), and Australian states (Christoff & Eckersley, 2021), as well as the Swedish CCA, which passed in 2017 and is one of the first post-Paris CCAs (Karlsson, 2021; Matti et al., 2021). Moreover, the Special Issue also deepens the scholarship on CCAs, by adding new theoretical perspectives and putting more parts of the climate policy process under the microscope. The range of theoretical backgrounds in the contributions to this Special Issue illustrates the development of this field and includes climate policy integration (Matti et al., 2021), discursive institutionalism (Bailey et al., 2021), deliberative democracy (Nash & Steurer, 2021a), policy learning, transfer and diffusion and the political dynamics of federal systems (Christoff & Eckersley, 2021). In terms of the policy process, we build upon work that is focused on the origins of CCAs in various legislatures to also consider the dynamics and consequences of established legislation, as well as a case of a failed policy process in Belgium (Orsini et al., 2021).

In their contribution, Sarah Nash and Reinhard Steurer (2021b) adopt a comparative approach, examining the emergence of six CCAs across four legislatures: Scotland in 2009 and 2019, Austria in 2011, Denmark in 2014 and 2020 and Sweden in 2017. Focusing on climate change discourse broadly and processes of deliberation within legislatures specifically, they show that heightened attention combined with a strong deliberative process within legislatures underpin more ambitious CCAs. Overall, their findings suggest that governments are more likely to adopt strong CCAs when prominent discursive junctures help to politicize climate policy and when parliamentary deliberation is strong. Moreover, overarching climate discourse and parliamentary deliberation had an even greater influence in their case studies than the political orientation of governments did.

The next several contributions focus on country case studies. Mikael Karlsson (Karlsson, 2021) analyses the origins of Sweden’s 2017 CCA. He focuses on the role played by an All-Party Committee on Environmental Objectives in which members from all participating parliamentary parties agreed unanimously to propose a CCA, despite a contested climate debate running in parallel and strong criticism from business confederations and trade unions. Karlsson shows that a continuous and comprehensive learning process in the All-Party Committee was instrumental for achieving consensus. Policy diffusion also played a role, with the Committee influenced by policy developments elsewhere, notably from the UK CCA and the UNFCCC Paris negotiations. The consensus formed within the Committee was instrumental for generating political support for the proposal in an otherwise conflictual political landscape and contributed to the eventual enactment of the CCA.

In their contribution, Simon Matti and colleagues (Matti et al., 2021) also examine the Swedish CCA and the broader Swedish Climate Policy Framework of which the CCA formed a part. They look at Sweden’s climate legislation from a different perspective, focusing on climate policy integration and asking whether it has been conducive to advancing climate mitigation. They focus on three dimensions of climate policy integration: (1) assessing policy processes; (2) outputs and outcomes; and (3) analysing political developments and policy outcomes in Sweden after the implementation of the Climate Policy Framework and the Climate Act. The results of a comprehensive set of interviews with policy experts and high-level decision-makers show that the Framework is believed to have had important effects, mainly in terms of policy implementation, cross-sector coordination, and the prioritization of the climate issue among public officials.

Focusing on the case of New Zealand, Ian Bailey and colleagues (Bailey et al., 2021) examine the discursive choices made by policy entrepreneurs during the negotiation of CCAs and how decision-makers sometimes need to compromise strategically in order to secure the political and stakeholder support needed for CCA adoption. Drawing upon theoretical insights from discursive institutionalism and policy entrepreneurship, they analyse discursive choices faced during negotiations surrounding the New Zealand Zero Carbon Act. Their analysis shows that actors adjusted their first-choice preferences for the content of the Act and changed their discursive approach to accommodate potentially oppositional groups in response to political-ideological constraints, in particular concerns over the Act’s implications for the agricultural sector.

Israel Solorio (Solorio, 2021) examines the case of Mexico, one of the first countries to adopt a CCA in 2012. His study analyses the dynamics of the Mexican CCA and interrogates why Mexico has been unable to fulfil its self-imposed climate goals under the CCA. He argues that the climate policy fragmentation observed in the Mexican case is the result of a dynamic process characterized by multi-level paralysis in government. This paralysis is caused by three interconnected factors: (1) weakness of the Mexican federal system affecting vertical integration of climate policy (CPI); (2) ambiguities in CCA mandates that are split across different institutions impeding horizontal CPI; and (3) uneven leadership in Mexican climate policy that generates a breach between promises made abroad and actual domestic implementation capacities. He concludes that any blueprint for organizing the Mexican administrative system to promote climate action should start with rethinking the role of climate federalism.

Peter Christoff and Robyn Eckersley (2021) focus on CCAs at the subnational level in Australia. Their contribution examines the puzzle of why, despite a long history of political conflict and paralysis over national climate policy, four Australian subnational governments have been global leaders in climate legislative innovation, producing durable and effective framework climate legislation similar to the UK CCA. They explain this subnational success by local legislative innovation in South Australia – the world’s first framework climate legislation geared towards a 2050 target – followed by political learning, policy transfer and a virtuous party-political competition, a process they label “convergent evolution”. Common across the cases were Labor or Labor-Green governments with a strong commitment by the premier and/or a lead minister to pursue a decarbonization strategy. A further commonality was a reliance on sources of advice for legislative reform that were professionally and/or politically committed to climate action, rather than from interest groups. They argue also that framework climate legislation carries lower political risks than an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) because it does not draw attention to the upfront costs of action.

The final country case study contribution, by Amandine Orsini and colleagues (Orsini et al., 2021), examines an instance of non-adoption of a CCA. They analyse the non-adoption of the Belgian bill on climate change in 2019, investigating the impact of CCA non-adoption on climate policies by: (1) questioning how CCAs are drafted, and the role of academic experts for such a task in a context of climate emergency; (2) analysing the reception and discussion of the bill on climate action, including within civil society; and (3) tracing the follow-up actions undertaken in the wake of the bill’s non-adoption. Although it was not adopted, they argue that the climate change act project opened new opportunities to rethink expertise and climate mobilization in Belgium. In sum, although the legislation failed, the legislative process and debate this entailed still had lasting impacts on climate action in Belgium.

The last two papers in the special issue focus on the cross-cutting themes of institutions and credible commitment, respectively. Alina Averchenkova and colleagues (2021) focus their attention on climate change advisory bodies, which are rapidly proliferating around the world and are often instituted by a CCA. Using the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) as an illustrative case, they investigate how such bodies influence political debates on climate change. They find that CCC analysis in the UK is used by all major political parties in parliamentary debates, and that CCC influence has grown over time. Furthermore, they find that most politicians have been supportive of the CCC and have utilized the information it produces to hold government accountable and to argue for more ambitious policy. Overall, the CCC experience demonstrates that climate change advisory bodies can play a key role in climate governance.

In the last paper, Matthew Lockwood (2021) focuses on the concept of credible commitment in climate mitigation policy. In contrast to much of the climate policy literature that advocates delegation of goal-setting to a technical body insulated from political incentives, he argues that the focus on legislation and delegation as the solution to the credible commitment problem is too narrow to apply in exactly the same manner to all jurisdictions. He argues that delegation fits the political logic in countries with majoritarian electoral systems, but that in countries with proportional electoral systems, negotiated long-term agreements between political parties can play an important role in generating credible commitment. He explores this argument through a comparison of experience from the UK and Denmark, arguing that both approaches appear to have worked to date, but that each is characterized by different mechanisms for accountability and for managing disputes. Internal mechanisms for managing disputes tend to be available in the context of long-term agreements, whereas delegation relies on informal intra-party politics to resolve conflicts that arise.

Policy Insights and Future Directions

The research we cover in this Special Issue on CCAs is directly policy-relevant. Indeed, there are numerous examples of research collating best-practice in CCAs (Duwe & Evans, 2020), drawing lessons learnt for policymakers (Hill, 2009). Some of these focus on monitoring the implementation of CCAs (Averchenkova et al., 2018; Client Earth, 2016; Fankhauser et al., 2018). Others constitute “how to” guides for legislatures to draw upon when developing their own legislation (World Bank, 2020). University researchers and people who are/were active in passing CCAs and relevant policy communities have also carried out research collaboratively (Carter & Childs, 2018). These contributions draw on insider experience to add rich empirical material to the academic literature. Adding to these policy-oriented studies, in this Special Issue we contribute important policy insights looking across the origins, dynamics, and consequences of CCAs.

The policy insights that relate to the origins and emergence of CCAs can be broadly grouped into the categories of context and legislative or parliamentary process. The authors across this Special Issue identify several contextual factors important for the successful passing of CCAs, including, a supportive discourse, where climate change is thought and talked about in ways that emphasizes the importance of and creates opportunities for climate action (Nash & Steurer, 2021b); and processes of diffusion, broadly speaking when policy decisions in one legislature are influenced by the policies of another (Karlsson, 2021). When combined, these can produce a virtuous, competition effect, especially in sub-state contexts (Christoff & Eckersley, 2021). An awareness of whether the context is generally supportive is also important for legislative initiatives and timing is key (Orsini et al., 2021). Underlying political tensions may only be deferred by compromises made in the legislative process and might resurface later, albeit in a reshaped political context (Bailey et al., 2021). The broader political context can also offer opportunities for the climate movement to broaden itself by connecting with social, economic, gender and de-colonial issues (Orsini et al., 2021).

The legislative or parliamentary process is also vital for the legislative outcome, and in this Special Issue we have identified a number of aspects that can contribute to the passing of ambitious legislation. Processes of joint learning can enhance ambition, although this can be time-consuming and needs to be comprehensive (Karlsson, this issue). Deliberative elements, such as cross-party committees where parliamentarians have opportunities to reflect upon their positions through informed and respectful dialogue, are also particularly important (Nash & Steurer, 2021a). Civil society consultations can also play an important role (Orsini et al., 2021), and strategic compromise may be necessary in order to usher through legislation (Bailey et al., 2021). The relationship between CCAs and more specific climate laws is not necessarily unidirectional, with the two being potentially mutually supportive (Karlsson, 2021). However, legislation is not the only option open to legislatures or parliaments. Particularly in jurisdictions that use proportional representation, formal cross-party agreements can provide an alternative to legislation that is more suited to majority and first-past-the-post systems (Lockwood, 2021).

A potentially useful dynamic of CCAs is that they carry lower political risk than ETSs or similar policies due to a lesser focus on upfront costs (Christoff & Eckersley, 2021). Expert advisory institutions, which are created in many CCAs, can play an important role as knowledge-brokers in climate policymaking (Averchenkova et al., 2021b). However, CCAs also carry a potentially damaging dynamic leading to policy fragmentation, which has also been observed in some contexts. For example, in the implementation of the Mexican CCA, fragmentation is fuelled by the federalist context, ambiguities in governmental mandates, and uneven leadership (Solorio, 2021).

The concept of climate policy integration provides an important potential avenue for assessing the consequences of CCAs, assessing processes, outputs, and outcomes (Matti et al., this issue). Harnessing this concept can allow consequences – such as changes in political culture, parliamentary debate and the emergence of specific policies – to be captured in addition to the quantifiable but difficult to attribute changes in GHG emissions. In the UK, the CCC generated knowledge spill-over effects, which is often cited as a technical basis for arguments made during political debates (Averchenkova et al., 2021b). In Sweden, key effects of implementing the Swedish climate policy framework have been identified in the climate policy debate, on coordination among key actors, as well as on policy implementation and support (Matti et al., 2021).

While the contributions to this Special Issue both broaden and deepen the literature on CCAs, and provide concrete policy insights, they also highlight a number of continuing gaps in the literature. First, comparative studies are still relatively rare, with single-legislature case studies continuing to dominate the literature. On the one hand, more comparative studies can help us to see beyond the boundaries of single case studies to draw broader lessons and, on the other hand, to begin to disentangle the impacts of different contextual factors on the policy process. Similarly, while the literature on origins is well-developed, there is comparatively little literature that addresses the dynamics and particularly the consequences of CCAs, including the legal consequences of substantive non-compliance with a framework law. More studies are needed in this direction if CCAs are to be treated as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Adaptation is a further area in the study of CCAs that warrants greater attention. Some CCAs include adaptation, although in the literature there is a bias towards studies of mitigation. Finally, going hand-in-hand with the side-lining of adaptation is the detectable geographical bias, where the majority of existing literature is focused on the Global North and indeed on Europe. Global South case studies receive relatively little attention despite many developing countries with active CCA processes underway or completed. Clearly there is an opportunity to diversify the CCA literature moving forward.

Working on CCAs, it is easy to get caught up in the minutae of the legislation: What are the numerical targets? How do they compare to other laws? What advisory bodies have been created and how good are their reports? Which jurisdiction currently has the ‘best’ CCA? While these discussions are interesting, especially to the climate policy community, it is also important to bear in mind that CCAs are framework legislation. They provide an orderly framework within which climate policymaking should take place and particular procedural markers that help to recognize at an early stage whether governments are complying. However, CCAs are usually largely devoid of policy content and thus do not represent an end point to climate policymaking. A CCA alone will not deliver the GHG emission reductions necessary for the planet to stick to global temperature goals such as those set down in the Paris Agreement. This means that CCAs – in particular their dynamics and consequences – are not only incredibly important areas of study, but also need to remain overtly political. Effective responses to climate change at the necessary scale and speed need to move well beyond purely bureaucratic or managerial tasks undertaken to comply with procedural requirements. In order for this to happen, political contestation and mobilization through the democratic process, including conserted pressure on governments the world over, will be required on a sustained basis. It is these political processes that open up opportunities for the societal transformation that effectively responding to climate change demands of us.

Additional information

Funding

Sarah L. Nash would like to thank the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP9) for funding her contribution through the project CCA, grant no. KR16AC0K13333. Simon Matti would like to thank Formas (Grant. No. 2016-00702) for funding his contribution.