RT Journal Article
T1 A Global Survey of Scientific Consensus and Controversy on Instruments of Climate Policy
A1 Drews, Stefan
A1 Savin, Ivan
A1 van den Bergh, Jeroen
K1 Política ambiental
K1 Política económica
AB There is continuing debate about which climate-policy instruments are most appropriate to reduce emissions. Undertaking a global survey among scientists who published on climate policy, we provide a systematic overview of (dis)agreements about six main types of policy instruments. The survey includes various fields across the social and natural sciences. The results show that, on average, all instruments are considered important, with direct regulation receiving the highest rating and adoption subsidies and cap-and-trade the lowest. The latter is surprising given the theoretical advantages and real-world success of the EU-ETS. Next, clustering scientific fields based on how important they consider the instruments, we determine five distinct groups, with (a) ecological economists and (b) mathematics/computer science being most dissimilar from other discipline clusters. We explain disagreement through assessing the relative importance assigned to policy criteria effectiveness, efficiency, equity and socio-political feasibility, as well as researchers' attitudes and background. Paying special attention to carbon pricing, motivated by its contested key role, we identify three respondent clusters, namely ‘enthusiasts’, ‘undecided’, and ‘skeptics’. Examining various policy arguments, we find that agreeing that carbon pricing effectively limits energy/carbon rebound and has potential to be harmonized globally have the strongest association with giving importance to this policy.
PB Elsevier
YR 2024
FD 2024-01-13
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/29333
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/29333
LA eng
NO Stefan Drews, Ivan Savin, Jeroen van den Bergh, A Global Survey of Scientific Consensus and Controversy on Instruments of Climate Policy, Ecological Economics, Volume 218, 2024, 108098, ISSN 0921-8009, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.108098
NO Funding for open Access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA.This work was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [grant agreement n° 741087].
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 24 ene 2026