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Taking stock of the implementation gap in climate policy

Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 752–755 (2023)Cite this article

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A gap persists between the emissions reductions pledged by countries under the Paris Agreement and those resulting from their domestic policies. We argue that this gap in fact contains two parts: one in the policies that countries adopt, and the other in the outcomes that those policies achieve.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries set targets to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and implement policies to achieve those targets. When a country first sets a target, an implementation gap — the gap between a country’s future emissions under the target and those under its current policies — is expected, because countries typically set targets beyond what they are already on course to achieve. If such a gap lingers over time, however, both national and global climate goals will fail.

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Fig. 1: The implementation gap and its contributing factors.
Fig. 2: The policy adoption gap (2014–2019) and pledge ambition ranking for select parties to the Paris Agreement.
Fig. 3: Strength of domestic climate policy (2018–2022) versus climate-related outcomes (2023).

Data availability

Data for Figs. 2 and 3 are available in the Supplementary Data.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the Swiss Network for International Studies. J.M. acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation (grant no. 2224086). T.S.S. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. T.F. acknowledges financial support from the Link Energy Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Taryn Fransen

  2. Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jonas Meckling

  3. Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jonas Meckling

  4. Institute of Political Science, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Anna Stünzi

  5. Energy Policy and Technology Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Tobias S. Schmidt, Florian Egli & Nicolas Schmid

  6. Institute for Science, Technology and Policy, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Tobias S. Schmidt

  7. INFRAS, Zurich, Switzerland

    Nicolas Schmid

  8. International Institute for Sustainable Development, Geneva, Switzerland

    Christopher Beaton

Authors
  1. Taryn Fransen
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  2. Jonas Meckling
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  3. Anna Stünzi
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  4. Tobias S. Schmidt
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  5. Florian Egli
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  6. Nicolas Schmid
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Contributions

Conceptualization: J.M. and T.F.; formal analysis: T.F.; visualization: T.F. and A.S.; writing (original draft): T.F., J.M. and A.S.; writing (reviewing and editing): T.F., J.M., A.S., T.S., F.E., N.S. and C.B.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jonas Meckling.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Data

Data for Figs. 2 and 3.

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Fransen, T., Meckling, J., Stünzi, A. et al. Taking stock of the implementation gap in climate policy. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 752–755 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01755-9

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