Climate policies and the progress towards the 2030 Climate & Energy Goals in Northern and Western Europe

Abstract: Climate change has been a topic of growing interest and importance during recent times. Since early on, the European Union has profiled itself as a leader in the fight against climate change by developing a comprehensive climate strategy. Learning-by-doing is an important aspect of this strategy, which creates the need for a thorough monitoring and analysis of both existing and past policies. With this study, the expected progress of the countries towards the 2030 Climate and Energy Targets is calculated, based on the goals set in the National Climate and Energy Plans. Second, the relationship between this progress and the different policy-mixes of the countries is investigated. There appear to be correlations between the progress and the share of rule-, economic- and information-focussed incentives, while voluntary and ‘other’ PaMs seem to be of less importance. Rule-focussed incentives show the most and strongest correlations. All the discovered correlations are negative, which means that a big share of one of the policy groups leads to a lower rate of progress. Therefore, it can be concluded that in order to show good progress, a country’s policy-mix should consist out of an equal share of all of the policy-groups.