The Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) conducts research and fosters dialogue about how the global commons, such as the atmosphere and the oceans, might be used and shared by many yet nevertheless be protected. A main theme is the compatibility of economic growth with sustainable development and climate protection.
Global demand shifts and supply chain interventions have the potential to reduce palm oil's environmental footprint, especially in otherwise unregulated plantations. This ultimately depends on deforestation reacting to prices in upstream, complex plantation-mill systems. We produce the first microeconomic panel of geolocalized palm oil mills, and we model their influence on palm plantations across Indonesia where the issue is most critical. We leverage our data granularity and the nature of the value chain to isolate downstream mill-gate price shocks that are exogenous to deforestation upstream. We find a positive elasticity to the mill-gate price of crude palm oil, in general and in two specific cases of unregulated deforestation-for smallholder plantations and for illegal industrial plantations. However, smallholder deforestation decelerates as palm fruit prices increase. These results inform the design of fair and effective conservation policy.
Driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is increasingly claiming lives and harming people's health worldwide. Mean annual temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees C above those of pre-industrial times for the first time in 2024. Despite ever more urgent calls to tackle climate change, greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels that same year. Climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends. Authored by 128 multidisciplinary experts worldwide, the 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change is the ninth-and most comprehensive-assessment of the links between climate change and health. The data in this report reveal that, as the health risks and impacts of climate change break concerning new records, progress is being reversed across key areas, further threatening health and survival. However, the evidence in this report also exposes important opportunities to accelerate action and prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Currently, most research explaining why countries lead or lag in climate policy assumes a problem-oriented perspective, focusing on barriers to climate policy adoption. Here, we argue that correcting for past failures, solving problems, and bringing climate policies back on track for the Paris Agreement requires a solution-oriented perspective on the political enablers of ambitious climate policies. We unite a growing research community that has previously been scattered across disciplinary subfields with various ontological and epistemological assumptions. Rooted in a thematic review of the scientific literature, we introduce a framework with a typology of six political enablers for ambitious climate policy at its core. For each enabler, we summarize key policy implications. We illustrate our framework with a case study on the adoption of emission trading systems in the transport and building sectors in Germany and the European Union (EU) allowing future solution-oriented research to build on our effort.
Current climate mitigation policies are not sufficient to meet the Paris temperature target, and ramping up efforts will require rapid learning from the scientific literature on climate policies. This literature is vast and widely dispersed, as well as hard to define and categorise, hampering systematic efforts to learn from it. We use a machine learning pipeline using transformer-based language models to systematically map the relevant scientific literature on climate policies at scale and in real-time. Our “living systematic map” of climate policy research features a set of 84,990 papers, and classifies each of them by policy instrument type, sector, and geography. We explore how the distribution of these papers varies across countries, and compare this to the distribution of emissions and enacted climate policies. Results suggests a potential stark under-representation of industry sector policies, as well as diverging attention between science and policy with respect to economic and regulatory instruments.
Land carbon fluxes are key to the Paris Agreement. However, data comparability issues persist between countries' land greenhouse gas inventories and mitigation targets, and what land models (bookkeeping and integrated assessments) provide as Paris-aligned benchmarks for land. As a result, the Global Stocktake, aiming to track collective mitigation progress, did not explicitly consider country targets for land. This blind spot leaves countries uninformed of the 2030 gap between their ambitions for mitigation on land and models' benchmarks. Here we track the contribution and evolution of land-related targets under countries' 2020 Nationally Determined Contributions, splitting land pledges between reduced emissions and additional sinks. Land retains a quarter of the global mitigation pledges in 2030, mostly relying on external support (-1.51.1 GtCO2e/yr), of which -0.55 GtCO2e/yr are additional sinks. It is crucial that future Global Stocktakes include appropriate comparisons between modelled and country-provided land use net emissions. We here offer some concrete suggestions.
