Del Ponte, A., Masiliūnas, A. and Lim, N. (2025) Decentralized voluntary agreements do not reduce emissions in a climate change experiment. Ecological Economics, 227. 108438. ISSN 0921-8009
Abstract
Can climate accords based on decentralized and voluntary agreements successfully reduce carbon emissions? We designed an economic experiment to study the effectiveness of the best-known mechanisms to foster international cooperation on climate change mitigation: climate pledges, financial penalties, and peer evaluation. We test each mechanism both separately and together. In the climate pledge treatments, participants could pledge their desired emissions target, approved by majority vote. In the treatments with financial penalties, failure to meet pledges triggered monetary sanctions. In the peer evaluation treatments, participants could evaluate each other, which determined who would receive an additional nonmonetary environmental prize. We find that most participants joined climate agreements and met their pledges, but pledges were insufficiently ambitious. As a result, neither pledges, financial penalties, nor peer evaluation reduced emissions. These results question the effectiveness of decentralized and voluntary climate agreements, such as the Paris Agreement.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Ecological Economics is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | Economics; Applied Economics; Climate Action |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 29 Nov 2024 08:20 |
Last Modified: | 29 Nov 2024 08:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier BV |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108438 |
Related URLs: | |
Sustainable Development Goals: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:220234 |