Policy Brief in 2021

We find that if all countries adopt the necessary uniform global carbon tax and then return the revenues to their citizens on an equal per capita basis, it will be possible to meet a 2 °C target while also increasing wellbeing, reducing inequality and alleviating poverty. These results indicate that it is possible for a society to implement strong climate action without compromising goals for equity and development.

Trade liberalization in the early 21st century increased the adaptation capacity of global food systems to climate change; further liberalization and trade facilitation could help to avoid dozens of millions being undernourished at mid-century. The global trade agenda should explicitly include climate change adaptation to achieve SDG 2 Zero Hunger.

Subscriptions to a free, weekly deforestation alert system available on the simple interface Global Forest Watch reduced deforestation in the protected areas and logging concessions of tropical African forests. This suggests that freely available near-real-time forest monitoring systems can help reduce emissions from deforestation if they are integrated with forest policies.

We find that the public prefers the costs of climate action to be constant over time, irrespective of whether average costs are low or high. Policymakers interested in combating global warming should therefore introduce policies that initially rely on stable cost schedules instead of the widely discussed alternative of ramping up costs over time.

Using a multi-sector model of human and natural systems, we find that the nationwide cost from state-varying climate policy in the United States is only one-tenth higher than that of nationally uniform policy. The benefits of state-led action — leadership, experimentation and the practical reality that states implement policy more reliably than the federal government — do not necessarily come with a high economic cost.