Research Topic

Publications

February 20, 2024

Publications

Report

February 20, 2024

The Political Economy of Global Climate Action: Where Does the West Go Next After COP28?

This report offers a critical, candid examination of the landscape of global climate action. Current efforts are lacking even amid consecutive UN climate conferences that build upon the successes of the 2015 Paris Agreement. It argues that the incremental progress achieved thus far is insufficient to address the escalating climate crisis. Challenges of domestic political economy and lacking global governance are substantively at fault. We identify several related barriers to effective climate action, including mismatched time horizons, shared public and private responsibility, the complexity of global challenges, and problems of global collective action and burden distribution. The report explores the distributional costs of climate policies, emphasizing the impacts of populism on climate action (and vice versa), and the need for a fair transition. Global governance challenges are attributable to the limits of existing multilateral institutions and the persistently difficult geopolitical and macroeconomic outlook. We conclude by offering a set of specific policy recommendations, spanning corporate taxation, public investment, long-term commitment mechanisms, the climate action-energy security interface, corporate responsibility, and the imperative of a just, equitable, and participatory transition. The proposed strategies can contribute to achieving time-consistent, decisive and systemic action that tackles the urgent climate crisis, building on political incentives and disincentives. This systematic lens – focused on political economy and global governance constraints - needs to be applied to all climate action policies to get ahead of the curve in the global and domestic political environment in which we find ourselves.

Publications

February 19, 2024

Publications

February 19, 2024

Roman Vakulchuk, Indra Overland

The failure to decarbonize the global energy education system: Carbon lock-in and stranded skill sets

The energy transition involves the transformation of professions and labour markets, which in turn depend on the availability of a workforce with the right education and competence. This study assesses how quickly global higher education is transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy in terms of educational content. The article is based on a review of 18,400 universities and the creation of a dataset of 6,142 universities that provide energy-specific education in 196 countries. The study compares the prevalence of educational programmes oriented towards fossil fuels and renewable energy. The findings show that the rapid adoption of renewable energy worldwide is not matched by changes in higher education, since universities continue to prioritise coal and petroleum studies. In 2019, 546 universities had faculties and/or degrees dedicated to fossil fuels whereas only 247 universities had faculties and/or degrees in renewable energy. As many as 68% of the world’s energy-focused educational degrees were oriented towards fossil fuels, and only 32% focused on renewable energy. This means that universities are failing to meet the growing demand for a clean energy workforce. At the current rate of change, energy-focused university degrees would be 100% dedicated to renewable energy only by the year 2107. Since a career may last 30-40 years, this creates a risk of long-term carbon lock-in and stranded skill sets through (mis)education. The results also indicate that developing countries lag behind developed ones in this area, even though the need for professionals trained in renewable energy is greater in developing countries. Along with lack of capital, underdeveloped regulatory frameworks for renewable energy, and entrenched fossil-fuel business interests, the mismatch between energy education and the needs of the renewable energy industry may hold back the energy transition in many developing countries.