D6.4.6 Showcase Climate and Energy Policy Ontology

The academic paper “Climate Policy in Practice: Which Instruments Do Governments Use, and Which Ones Do Researchers Study?” uses the Climate and Energy Policy Ontology (CEPO) developed by NFDI4Energy to categorize different types of climate policy instruments and measure whether the instruments that are most widespread in the real world are being studied to the same extent in the academic literature. We find that most academic work focuses on a small sub-set of economic policy instruments (especially carbon taxes, emissions trading and feed-in tariffs). However, there is relatively less work on other economic instruments that are more difficult to measure, and even less on regulatory policy instruments. These insights would not have been possible without using the Climate and Energy Policy Ontology because it has detailed and mutually exclusive definitions of policy instruments, and is interoperable with policy datasets. To enable better communication with non-expert ontology users, a simplified version is also published on the Climate Policy Atlas website and can be easily visualized and searched.