D4.5.1.1 Draft climate policy ontology report

The climate crisis has led to increased engagement from governments around the world to mitigate emissions. At the same time, academia has increasingly focused on how this can be done as quickly as possible, and lively debates have emerged on the effectiveness of different policies at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, academics are often constrained by a lack of cross-country, comparable and detailed information on policies. This is partly because of the way that data is gathered: until now, there has been no unified method and definition for climate policy and its sub-components of climate policy instruments. We discovered this issue as part of our work on gathering data on climate policies within NFDI4Energy Task Area 2: several attempts at gathering and publishing data exist, but they are not consistent, which makes analysis difficult, because there was no unified or even explicit ontology on climate policy instruments. This means that climate policy data lacks interoperability and cannot be combined across sources – hindering researchers from being able to analyze policies, including their effectiveness. This, in turn, means that empirical knowledge of what works in climate policy is patchy and limited to the few single cases with good data availability. Multi-case and cross-temporal policy instrument analysis is rare. We therefore create a climate policy instrument ontology which includes various climate policy instruments governments use to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Our ontology of potential policy instruments is based on the Open Energy Ontology (OEO), and typologies that institutions use to gather climate policy data from Climate Policy Database (CPDB) and Climate Policy Radar (CPR). This is also complemented by a preliminary academic literature review and input from climate policy researchers. This results in this draft ontology. At the time of writing this document, we are validating, cross-checking and, wherever needed or helpful, updating it through a systematic literature review. Our ontology demonstrates the importance of systems to harmonize the collection and analysis of climate policy data, which are currently lacking. In addition, it reveals blind spots in the current academic research on how different instruments impact emissions and decarbonization, for example on regulatory instruments, which may be due to a lack of cross-national and machine-readable data given the lack of comparable categorizations through ontologies.