Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Global Student Policy Alliance Creates Climate Policy Database

“Students from four universities — including Cornell — and two countries have worked to compile a comprehensive database of climate policy initiatives from the 193 member states of the United Nations. These students comprise the Global Student Policy Alliance, a transatlantic association of think tanks based at Cornell, the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cambridge. The group of about 30 students met over a planning period this summer to divide up the research as they explored different countries’ policies. Zarek Drozda, one of the project organizers and analyst for the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago, said the inspiration for the database grew out of a joint project between the Wilberforce Society, a University of Cambridge student think tank, and the Paul Douglas Institute, a UChicago public policy think tank. The students set to condense a wide array of public sources of climate information into qualitative rankings of both global climate policy proposed and implemented. Many of its members see the project as an extension of youth climate activism, such as the Fridays for Future movement associated with Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. According to Stella Linardi ’22, one of the researchers from Cornell, members wanted to expand on the youth climate movement and analyze the difference between countries’ climate change policies on paper compared to policy implementations. The team established a global ranking by country, assessing the effectiveness of each climate policy.

NGOs and also governmental institutions have a lot of constraints when doing research. Students from different universities don’t really have these institutional constraints,” Linardi said. “We were able to assess every single country’s fossil production and policy commitments, deforestation processes, extraction radars, really the climate policy of every single country.”…

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.