Aiming for zero: what makes nations adopt carbon neutral pledges?

Abstract

Amid widespread inaction in the face of the looming threat of climate change, the leaders of nine nation-states have opted for a bold, seemingly anomalous, course of action by making national carbon neutrality pledges. Because prior research has focused on why states fail to curb emissions, there is a paucity of research on why some states take a different path by committing to drastic emission reductions. This research aims to help fill that gap. First, a content analysis of 252 newspaper articles reveals that New Zealand made the first pledge and eight other states have followed. Second, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is used to compare political and social conditions in states with carbon neutral pledges to conditions in a randomly selected group of states without such pledges. Pledge states, compared to non-pledge states, have better governance scores on world indices, an abundant presence of global environmental NGOs, and smaller populations. Pledge states also have lower levels of income inequality (measured by Gini coefficients) than non-pledge states. I argue that these conditions (effective governance, abundant NGOs, small population sizes, and egalitarian class structures) facilitate collective action, and thus enabled some states to make carbon neutral pledges.

Bhutan: Can the 1.5 °C Agenda Be Integrated with Growth in Wealth and Happiness?

“…The additional cost under the KBS scenario suggests allocating the limited financial resources towards the carbon neutral goal that could compete with the budget for other pertinent socioeconomic developmental needs. The result supports the viewpoint of Flagg (2015), who calls the carbon neutral pledge as a 'generous public good ' (p. 209). However, in a carbon constrained world, where emission reduction targets are being accelerated following the Paris Agreement (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2016), such additional costs could be met through the global carbon market.…”

Carbon Neutral by 2021: The Past and Present of Costa Rica’s Unusual Political Tradition

“…As the world's first country to make a carbon neutral pledge, the country set a precedent for others to follow. Several other nations have since made identical pledges [1].…”

“…With airlines, hotels, and rental car companies all pledging to become carbon neutral [62], the pledge has created opportunities for the continued growth of ecotourism that is purported to have a small carbon footprint.…”

“…In 2007, political elites in Costa Rica pledged to make the country the first in the world to become carbon neutral, or to emit net zero carbon emissions [1]. This decision seems somewhat unusual, given Costa Rica's nearly negligible contribution to the production of greenhouse gas emissions in recent years [2].…”

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“…In recent years, the response to climate mitigation has taken on a more polycentric form (Ostrom, 2010), as groups at diverse levels of scale have adopted strategies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions (Ehrhardt-Martinez et al, 2015). As part of this trend, several nations have made pledges to become carbon neutral in the future (Flagg, 2015). These nations aim to reduce emissions and balance remaining emissions with carbon sequestration or offsets (Fukuda and Tamura, 2010).…”