Why it’s so hard to tell which climate policies actually work
Better tools are needed to analyse their effects
NATIONAL CLIMATE policies are a relatively recent invention. In 1997, according to the Grantham Institute, a think-tank at the London School of Economics, there were 60; by 2022 the number had risen to almost 3,000. Their effectiveness has proved almost impossible to measure. In August, an international research group published the first global evaluation of climate policies in Science, a journal. The study, which looked at around 1,500 policies implemented in 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, found that just 63 could be linked to sizeable reductions in emissions.
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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “So much hot air”
From the October 5th 2024 edition
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary
If SpaceX can land and reuse the most powerful rocket ever made what can’t it do?
Could life exist on one of Jupiter’s moons?
A spacecraft heading to Europa is designed to find out
Noise-dampening tech could make ships less disruptive to marine life
Solutions include bendy propellers and “acoustic black holes”
Meet Japan’s hitchhiking fish
Medaka catch rides on obliging birds, confirming one of Darwin’s hunches
AI wins big at the Nobels
Awards went to the discoverers of micro-RNA, pioneers of artificial-intelligence models and those using them for protein-structure prediction
Google’s DeepMind researchers among recipients of Nobel prize for chemistry
The award honours protein design and the use of AI for protein-structure prediction