This paper investigates the conditions under which subnational concerns shape public assessments of international climate governance. In line with existing literature, we maintain that costly policy adjustments fuel negative views of international co-operation in policy-exposed regions. At the same time, we argue that the more resentful relations are with the national center of politics, the more sympathetic these regions are to international institutions and global governance. Based on geographically targeted survey data from the United Kingdom, we find that fossil fuel-intensive regions with strong, institutionalized regional politics have more positive assessments of international climate co-operation than structurally similar regions where regional political institutions are less pronounced. The findings show that regional politics characteristics are key for understanding climate policy beliefs among citizens that bear the brunt of adjustments to international climate agreements.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health challenge that, like climate change, demands urgent, coordinated, multi-sectoral action. Yet, responses to AMR may be ill-suited to local contexts, overlook historical inequalities, or dismiss marginalised knowledge systems. Some of these concerns can be discussed using the concept of a just transition, which aims to ensure that “no one is left behind,” “all voices are heard,” and past injustices are addressed. However, framing justice in these terms is insufficient. We argue for a more multifaceted and broader-scoped understanding of what justice demands in a just transition for AMR. We examine existing justice frameworks in AMR literature and discuss two cases that motivate our call for including both more forms of justice in a multifaceted concept of a just transition and a broader scope of justice. The first case involves over-the-counter antibiotic access in the Kibera informal settlement near Nairobi, highlighting structural injustices resulting from colonial oppression and what an Ubuntu philosophy would show as injustice. The second case concerns veterinary prescription requirements for Maasai pastoralists’ livestock farming in southern Kenya and highlights epistemic and distributive injustices, as well as injustices that befall non-human animals. These examples reveal distinct injustices shaped by socio-cultural and ecological contexts.

Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced by people’s political trust. We tested this expectation by randomly assigning survey respondents to read different versions of given policies and confirmed that individuals with low political trust, who are less supportive overall of most policies, are most sensitive to variation in implied costs. We argue this interaction effect is a previously untested implication of the influential theory that political trust operates as a heuristic, and it helps explain policies’ varying popularity, including the puzzle of why carbon taxes are highly unpopular.

Climate change poses an existential threat, necessitating effective climate policies to enact impactful change. Decisions in this domain are incredibly complex, involving conflicting entities and evidence. In the last decades, policymakers increasingly use simulations and computational methods to guide some of their decisions. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are one of such methods, which combine social, economic, and environmental simulations to forecast potential policy effects. For example, the UN uses outputs of IAMs for their recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Traditionally these have been solved using recursive equation solvers, but have several shortcomings, e.g. struggling at decision making under uncertainty. Recent preliminary work using Reinforcement Learning (RL) as an alternative to traditional solvers shows promising results in decision making in uncertain and noisy scenarios. We extend on this work by introducing multiple interacting RL agents as a preliminary analysis on modelling the complex interplay of socio-interactions between various stakeholders or nations that drives much of the current climate crisis. Our findings show that cooperative agents in this framework can consistently chart pathways towards more desirable futures in terms of reduced carbon emissions and improved economy. However, upon introducing competition between agents, for instance by using opposing reward functions, desirable climate futures are rarely reached. Modelling competition is key to increased realism in these simulations, as such we employ policy interpretation by visualizing what states lead to more uncertain behavior, to understand algorithm failure. Finally, we highlight the current limitations and avenues for further work to ensure future technology uptake for policy derivation.

Solar radiation modification (SRM) presents important challenges to risk regulation and governance, arising from the array of multiple risks that SRM may influence. SRM would not simply reverse climate change, but could pose further ancillary impacts, depending on the method of SRM, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), marine cloud brightening (MCB), or a space-based planetary sunshade system (PSS). We identify multiple risks that SRM may influence, both biophysical and sociopolitical, to be compared to the multiple risks that may be affected by greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation and climate adaptation. This multi-risk framework helps analysts and decision makers identify, evaluate, and compare multiple risks holistically; helps identify affected groups to overcome problems of disregard and omitted voice; helps compare policy options and map the array of risks to corresponding (or missing) governance mechanisms; and seeks risk-superior policies that would reduce multiple risks in concert. We then examine governance frameworks: uncoordinated, coordinated and comprehensive. We suggest two key mechanisms that can help build up from uncoordinated toward more coordinated or even comprehensive approaches, and that can gain support from SRM advocates, observers and critics alike: a series of international assessments of SRM, and a transparent international monitoring system for SRM.

Why do companies sometimes lobby legislators directly and sometimes act predominantly through business associations? Although economic factors, such as size and profitability, are well-known determinants of companies’ decision to lobby, they alone cannot explain the choice in lobbying strategies. This paper provides an explanation for why companies sometimes choose to lobby collectively: reputation. When firms want to lobby in favor of a publicly unpopular position, channeling their efforts through business associations can help them shield themselves from reputational consequences. To test this theory, this paper provides evidence from firms’ lobbying on climate change. Combining climate-friendliness ratings of corporate lobbying with an original survey experiment, it demonstrates the existence of reputational costs from lobbying alone and shows that lobbying through business associations helps firms avoid such costs. For the study of lobbying positions, these results imply important systematic differences in the positions firms take alone and collectively.

The international investment regime provides generous protections for foreign investors against adverse legal changes in host states, and unusually strong procedural rights to enforce those protections in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Scholars have observed that the regime enables corporate capital accumulation and raises the costs of climate action, potentially deterring states from adopting ambitious climate policies. Building on this literature, we locate a key source of these concerns in the asymmetric treatment of state and investor behavior in ISDS, which allows investors to depict themselves as innocent victims of “unfair” and “unforeseeable” “political” processes, despite themselves being active political players and sophisticated political risk managers—a tactic we call feigned victimization. This tactic is employed by fossil fuel companies to achieve capital accumulation and climate obstruction goals. We illustrate our argument through an empirical case study of TC Energy’s US$15 billion ISDS claim against the United States in relation to the Biden Administration’s revocation of a permit required to construct the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Our case study also illustrates a method by which states can expose feigned victimization tactics by investors and incorporate evidence of this into their legal defenses in ISDS.

Shifting to cycling in urban areas reduces greenhouse gas emissions and improves public health. Access to street-level data on bicycle traffic would assist cities in planning targeted infrastructure improvements to encourage cycling and provide civil society with evidence to advocate for cyclists’ needs. Yet, the data currently available to cities and citizens often only comes from sparsely located counting stations. This paper extrapolates bicycle volume beyond these few locations to estimate street-level bicycle counts for the entire city of Berlin. We predict daily and average annual daily street-level bicycle volumes using machine-learning techniques and various data sources. These include app-based crowdsourced data, infrastructure, bike-sharing, motorized traffic, socioeconomic indicators, weather, holiday data, and centrality measures. Our analysis reveals that crowdsourced cycling flow data from Strava in the area around the point of interest are most important for the prediction. To provide guidance for future data collection, we analyze how including short-term counts at predicted locations enhances model performance. By incorporating just 10 days of sample counts for each predicted location, we are able to almost halve the error and greatly reduce the variability in performance among predicted locations.

Recent studies suggest that value orientations, both pro-environmental values and concerns and left–right ideology, strongly predict climate policy support in some settings, but not in others, and that institutional quality determines the strength of these associations. These studies are based on a limited number of countries and do not investigate the mechanisms at work nor what aspects of quality of government (QoG) matter more specifically. Analyzing data from 135 European regions across 15 countries, this paper finds that QoG moderates the relationships of pro-environmental values and left–right ideology with climate tax support and suggests that political trust is an underlying individual-level mechanism. Moreover, corruption seems to be the most important aspect of QoG for policy support. In regions where corruption is prevalent and trust in state institutions is low, support for climate taxes is low even among those who are generally concerned about the environment and climate change and who favor state intervention. The study suggests additional analyses, adopting quantitative and qualitative approaches, to inform policymakers on how to increase public support for climate taxation and improve policy designs to mitigate policy concerns across various segments of the population.

In the context of climate change, the impacts of extreme weather events are increasingly recognised as a significant threat to mental health in the UK. As clinicians and researchers with an interest in mental health, we have a collective responsibility to help understand and mitigate these impacts. To achieve this, however, it is vital to have an appreciation of the relevant policy and regulatory frameworks. In this feature article, a collaboration amongst mental health and policy experts, we provide an overview of the integration of mental health within current climate policies and regulations in the UK, including gaps and opportunities. We argue that current policy and regulatory frameworks are lacking in coverage, ambition, detail and implementation, as increases in weather extremes and their negative impacts on mental health outpace action. For example, across current national and local climate policies, there is almost no reference to the impacts of extreme weather events on mental health. Whilst alarming, this provides scope for future research to fill evidence gaps and inform policy and regulatory change. We call for mental health and policy experts to work together to improve our understanding of underlying mechanisms and develop practical interventions, helping to bring mental health within climate policy and regulatory frameworks.

This article scrutinizes the role of transparency in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Specifically, it examines a widely heard claim that ‘transparency is the backbone of the Paris Agreement’, and the assumption that mandatory transparency (reporting and review) is essential to fill potential gaps in climate action left by voluntary, nationally determined climate targets. We subject this claim to critical scrutiny by tracing the political contestations around the desired role of transparency in the UNFCCC, with a focus on mitigation-related transparency. Our analysis shows that, despite developing countries expressing concerns during the pre-Paris negotiations, the Paris Agreement's enhanced transparency framework (ETF) is almost exclusively ‘enhanced’ (compared with earlier provisions) for developing countries, with some instances of regression for developed countries. Furthermore, the effects of such enhanced reporting are not straightforward and might de facto have an impact on countries’ autonomy to nationally determine their mitigation targets in diverse ways, even as all the detailed reporting does not facilitate comparability of effort. With implementation of the ETF due to start in 2024, our analysis provides a timely exploration of the extent to which transparency is really a backbone of the Paris Agreement, and for whom and with what implications for ambitious action from all under the international climate regime. It calls into question whether the transformative potential of transparency, much extolled within the UNFCCC process, will materialize for all countries in a similar manner or rather will have an impact on countries differentially.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.