Climate Change Laws

Climate Change Laws of the World

Climate Change Laws of the World is a database covering national-level climate change legislation and policies from around the world. These laws and policies address policy areas directly relevant to climate change mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage or disaster risk management. More specifically, the database includes laws and policies that establish rules and procedures related to the transition to low-carbon economies, enhancing adaptation capabilities, and disaster risk management.

As of June 2023, the database includes documents submitted by Parties and non-Party stakeholders to the UNFCCC, including, among others, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Communications and Adaptation Communications, IPCC reports, and submissions to the first Global Stocktake (hereinafter: Submissions to the UNFCCC). (see FAQ ‘What UNFCCC documents are included?’). For more information please visit our Methodology section.

This database originates from a collaboration between the Grantham Research Institute and GLOBE International on a series of Climate Legislation Studies. Since then, Climate Change Laws of the World has transformed into one of the Grantham Research Institute’s core strategic projects, underpinning much of the Institute’s work on our governance and legislation theme.

What can be done with Climate Change Law tool

• Find climate and climate-related laws, policies, strategies and action plans from every country and submissions to the UNFCCC relevant to country level action
  
• Search for keywords and policy concepts (like ‘electric vehicles’ or ‘gender equality’) across the full text of all documents
  
• View your search term (and related phrases) highlighted in search results
  
• Browse country profiles to find and compare their climate laws, policies and strategies
  

Dataset

This document contains 3 tabs: Documents - all the documents from the Climate Change Laws of the World dataset
Events - key events in the evolution of a law or policy and their dates
UNFCCC_Documents - all the documents added to the database as part of our work on https://gst1.org/

Introduction

Law and Policies in the Climate Change Laws of the World Dataset/ Climate Policy Radar Database are assigned to families. Each family represents a single law or policy, but may be made up of several documents. For example a family may include the text of a law, a translation of the law, and a press release explaining the law issued by the relevant government department. Some families are further grouped into collections, particularly for longstanding policy responses that have developed over longer periods. An example of this is the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.

How to find the number of laws and policies in the dataset:

Each row in this csv represents an individual document. Each family is given a unique family ID number, which are displayed in the column called "CPR Family ID" (column W) in the Documents tab of this excel file. When a family contains more than one document, the family ID will appear more than once in the ID column. To find the total number of policy and law families currently in the database, you will need to isolate the family ID and ensure each one is counted only once. If you would like to count the total number of laws OR policies in the dataset, you will need to first filter by either legislative or executive families by applying the excel filter function to the Category column (column L).

Top tip: one way to isolate family IDs in MS excel is to copy the data from the Family ID column (column A) and paste this data into a new window. Then, you will need to remove duplicated ID numbers in the column (using the Remove Duplicates excel command). You should then be able to count unique family ID numbers from the remaining data.

How to find dates for rows in the "documents" tab

Dates are included in the "Events" tab. The best way to match the two datasets is to use the "CPR Family ID".

The way to think of is as follows: A. each row in the Documents csv is a physical document. A physical document is a single document, in any format, containing text relating to a law or policy. B. all physical documents belong to document families. A document family is one or more physical documents, centred around a main document, which jointly contain all relevant information about the main document. For example, where a document has a translation, amendments or annexes, those files are stored together as a family. C. events describe the lifecycle of a document family. Most have only one event: the published date. Some have more detail. See this example. The date that appears on the document family will be the date of the first event in the family. example of page with multiple events

Access the complete dataset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XTt6JQxrBMBfLGEuSmd9s7CsywboBerm/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102720697735200195659&rtpof=true&sd=true

Reference

1. https://climate-laws.org/