https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3758-8971
We are excited and honoured to take over the project of steering Climate Policy from our illustrious predecessors, Frank Jotzo and Harald Winkler as co-Editors-in-Chief, and Jan Corfee-Morlot as Editor. They have handed over to us a journal with high credibility, wide readership, and an important voice in climate policy. At the same time, we are also sobered by our responsibility to inform public debate and policy formulation at a time of great challenges and seeming contradictions. Climate change has never been more firmly on the political and policy radar. Yet, emissions trends and evidence of impacts continue to alarm, and, as many countries increasingly look inward, the prospects for enhanced global cooperation appear slim.
How can a journal like Climate Policy best contribute to identifying, analysing and proposing climate solutions? Surely, part of the answer is ensuring continued quality in time-honoured areas of the journal, including but not limited to UN climate negotiations, regulatory policy instruments, carbon pricing, adaptation, and climate equity, to name but a few. But equally, it is incumbent on Climate Policy to be at the leading edge of new issues, developments and perspectives.
As the new Editors-in-Chief and Editor, we wish to signal three areas of attention. First, the scale and scope of the climate challenge blurs the boundaries between ‘climate policy’ and other spheres of decision-making; the journal must engage with the reality that distinctions between ‘climate’ and ‘non-climate’ policy are becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Second, with the majority of potential future emissions from and the greatest burden of impacts on the developing world, Climate Policy must better articulate diverse perspectives and analysis from the Global South. Finally, the dwindling available carbon budget to stay within a 2°C global temperature rise, let alone 1.5°C, along with the growing evidence of climate impacts, requires the journal to rise to the challenge of thinking beyond incrementalism, including providing critical thinking on emergent issues.
In the remainder of this opening editorial, we share first our understanding of the current state of play, and then turn to how we might steer Climate Policy to deeper engagement with these three dimensions of the challenge.
State of play: two steps forward, one step back?
Few who work on climate change can be sanguine about the extent of progress over the past thirty-five years in addressing climate change. Global greenhouse emissions continue to rise, while the temperature record is already bumping against the 1.5°C threshold. Impacts – such as the Pakistan floods of 2022 and Canadian forest fires of 2023 to name just two – are growing in frequency and intensity, with attribution studies providing ever clearer linkage to climate drivers.
Of course, there are significant signs of progress. The pace of renewable energy deployment continues to accelerate: the International Energy Agency’s ‘Renewables 2023’ report finds that 50% more renewable capacity was added in 2023 than in 2022, and projects that by 2025 renewable electricity generation will match and outstrip coal-based generation. Climate change laws are proliferating, as countries seek to re-make their governance systems to more effectively address both mitigation and adaptation. The outcome of the UN climate negotiations in 2023 explicitly called, for the first time, for a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, as well as for a tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030. The same meeting operationalized a historic new fund to help countries affected by loss and damage from climate impacts. These examples of illustrative of many important achievements.
But too many such indicators of progress also come with questions or caveats. The Paris Agreement-driven NDC framework has provided a way forward for all countries to periodically increase ambition and outline actions in a ‘nationally determined’ way, but aggregate ambition, let alone implementation, continues to fall short and serious concerns over climate equity remain. Despite incorporation of internationally agreed language on fossil fuel transition, fossil fuel development continues, including in industrialized countries that have peaked their emissions. Moreover, for renewables to more fully replace fossil fuels in the energy mix, many challenging technological, institutional and political barriers need to be overcome. Despite recognition of its growing importance, total climate-related finance and investment falls far short of what is necessary, particularly in developing countries; according to the OECD it took developed countries’ two additional years to finally deliver on their promise to mobilize US$ 100 billion in climate finance by 2020. Yet, grant finance remains too low, questions over accounting categories persist, and the overall share continues to favour mitigation over adaptation.
In some ways, it is only realistic to expect this sort of uneven and halting progress in a political system where responses to global challenges are hostage to national politics, and indeed increasingly so. The collective task before us is nothing less than breaking the historical co-evolution between industrial development and fossil fuels, and re-envisioning and realizing new pathways of low-carbon and resilient development. The bad news is that time is not on our side; the good news is that the current conversation is overwhelmingly about how to accomplish these shifts, rather than whether to do so.
As an academic journal seeking to inform practice, this ‘how’ question is the terrain Climate Policy was designed to cover. Our first task as Editors, therefore, is to continue publishing original and rigorous papers that reinforce the forward momentum, while addressing the questions and caveats that slow progress. Moving forward, to rise to the challenge before us, we aim to steer Climate Policy toward deeper engagement toward the three issues identified earlier: addressing linkages across policy issues, perspectives from the Global South and approaches that go beyond incrementalism.
Expanding the scope of Climate Policy
While climate change and its policy response have its roots in the field of environment, the scale and scope of the issue has always required a far broader lens. Sectoral decisions carry implications for emissions futures and resilience, and decisions made by finance ministries and global financial institutions, can shape climate outcomes. Because concerns other than climate change are also at stake, climate change cannot be a starting or ending point for all these decisions, but, increasingly, it needs to be integral to the conversation. The widely used term ‘mainstreaming’ partially captures this process, but its incremental overtones don’t fully capture the extent of integration required or observed. A few examples illustrate this trend.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has framed mitigation and adaptation futures around choices between alternative ‘development pathways’, embedding climate futures into larger discussions around patterns of urbanization, agricultural choices, and behaviour and lifestyles. In some countries, climate policy has become inseparable from considerations of green industrial policy – state-led approaches to create jobs and spur growth by incentivizing development and deployment of green technologies – which has also spilled over into discussions of trade policy and potentially barriers. With increasing calls for shifting trillions, rather than mobilizing billions, of dollars toward green energy transition and climate resilience, financing and investment are becoming central to mitigation and adaptation.
Inter-linked policy-making also calls for re-thinking state capacities, which in most countries are built around silo-based sectoral line ministries ill-suited to integrative decision-making. It also calls for ways to create the conditions for broad-based decision-making where perspectives from communities, civil society and social movements are given meaningful recognition and importance. Not least, even in a world distracted by a state of polycrisis, climate change is woven into the fabric of geopolitical and geoeconomic conversation; progress on climate change is shaped, and occasionally shapes, international relations.
For a journal such as Climate Policy, this broadening of scope brings opportunity and a much wider audience. But it also brings conceptual challenges. Should ‘climate policy’ only focus on efforts that intentionally address climate mitigation and adaptation? Or should it also embrace policy conversations that have the effect of shaping climate outcomes, but that may be framed substantially around other objectives? Too narrow, and we risk irrelevance. Too broad, and we risk losing focus.
As a new editorial team, we are encouraged by the prospects of drawing broader linkages across issues areas. At the same time, even after a few months in our editorial roles, we already see the challenges in implementing this broader scope, which requires openness to new issue areas as diverse as plastics and the role of central banks, and more careful attention to spelling out the relevance of diverse themes to mitigation and adaptation policy outcomes. On balance, this broadening of the lens is both necessary and exciting, and we seek to embrace it without losing the characteristics that have made Climate Policy a distinctive voice.
Perspectives from and on the Global South
The Global South is where the vast majority of the world’s population lives, where unmet development needs are greatest, where a growing proportion of future energy demand growth will arise, where current but notably not historical or per capita emissions are highest and growing, where the bulk of natural resources to build net-zero enabling technologies will be sourced, where losses due to climate impacts will be greatest, where infrastructure is yet to be built but where the cost of capital to enable low-carbon transitions is the highest, and where governance capacity tends to be relatively weaker. It is no exaggeration to say that the success or failure or climate policy-making will, in large part, rest on choices made in the diverse countries of the Global South. Yet, like most other journals, submissions from developing regions (except China) continue to be underrepresented.
Even while encouraging perspectives from and on the Global South, we use this term with caution, and with full awareness of the substantial and growing differences across regions and countries often placed in this category. Indeed, we envision Climate Policy as a place for nuanced and context-specific discussion of the different pathways to low-carbon and climate-resilient transitions, taking into account development needs and historical inequalities, ideally led by those who understand their contexts the best.
This might require addressing questions such as: How can energy needs be met while avoiding lock-in to high-carbon pathways and creating stranded assets? How can highly indebted countries finance mitigation and adaptation? How can resource-rich countries of the Global South avoid past traps that keep them at the bottom of the global value chain as raw materials providers to the metropoles of manufacturing? How can countries with low state capacity address the additional needs of adaptation while redoubling their development efforts? Not least, how can research on low-carbon transitions take adequate account of the historical inequalities across countries while also remaining alert to the potential for exacerbating inequalities within countries? As an editorial team, we are committed to encouraging submissions from developing countries on themes such as these, while rigorously maintaining the quality standards of the journal.
Beyond incrementalism
There is continued important policy work to be done within the important but well-worn furrows of climate policy – making carbon markets work better; embedding climate resilience into agriculture; and designing improved constructs and processes for climate negotiations, for example. Yet, there is also a need to think beyond incrementalism, and explore both the opportunities and pitfalls of more potentially disruptive approaches.
A journal focused on climate policy must welcome critical thinking on emerging, if controversial themes, such as negative emissions technologies and their governance, the politics and the implications of ‘degrowth’, links between colonial roots of power relations and climate change, and managed retreat in coastal areas. Large questions about forms of economic development emergent in the Global South and patterns of global trade are deeply salient to achieving low-carbon and just futures, as illustrated by choices faced today by nations providing raw materials for the energy transition. The impact of global disruptive shocks – whether COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or artificial intelligence – on climate policy should also be part of the conversation curated by the journal.
Going beyond incrementalism may also imply that authors make more effort to communicate their work to colleagues, the media, policymakers, civil society, and business. This effort at enhanced communication is a task to which the journal is committed. The challenge for us, as an editorial team, will be to remain open to these broader themes and communication approaches, even while remaining faithful to the core objectives of the journal.
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We close this introductory editorial by humbly acknowledging the platform built by those who came before us, and on whose work we build. This includes the founding Editor-in-Chief, Michael Grubb, our immediate predecessors, Frank Jotzo and Harald Winkler, and past Editors, Jan Corfee-Morlot, Joanna Depledge, Peter Mallaburn and Richard Lorch, along with many others too numerous to mention who have supported the editorial team throughout our 24 years. We are also deeply grateful to Joanna for continuing in her role as Senior Editorial Advisor, and sharing with us her wisdom and institutional memory as we learn the ropes. The journal works at a high level because of a wonderful editorial team: Polona Barber, Alister Self and Anna West; Associate Editors, Sonja Klinsky, Axel Michaelowa, and Charlotte Streck; and a strong and engaged raft of Editorial Board members who will, we know, keep us honest and connected to the community. Harriet Konishi and her colleagues at Taylor & Francis have been very supportive in smoothing our transition into this role. The reviewers, who give selflessly of their time and expertise, make our work possible and are the bedrock of ensuring a quality journal. And, not least, we wish to thank the broad, growing and increasingly diverse group of authors who entrust us with shepherding their work to publication, and our readers, who do us the ultimate compliment by engaging with the journal. We look forward to working with you all to take the journal, and climate policy, to new heights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).