Reports & Case Studies
CHEVRE Antoine
Transport Team Leader
REALITY CHECK - Lessons from 25 Policies Advancing a Low-Carbon Future - World Bank
In the past year, records for extreme weather events continued to be broken, as our changing climate swept in a new round of storms, heat waves, flooding, and drought, bringing life-changing devastation to millions of people. Although climate change affects every corner of the world, poor people and developing countries are more severely affected by its negative effects. In the summer of 2022, flash flooding in Pakistan triggered by glacial melt and monsoon rains submerged vast swaths of the country, providing a devastating example of the magnitude of climate-induced destruction. As of October 2022, around 33 million people—that is, one in seven of Pakistan’s population—had been affected. For countries like Pakistan, climate change is a serious risk multiplier that hinders sustainable and inclusive development and will do so more in the future.
Eight years after the historic signing of the Paris Agreement, governments across the globe face two mutually dependent challenges: investing in resilience to ensure a disaster-resistant future and accelerating the decarbonization of energy and land-use systems. Without decarbonization, global emissions will continue to march upward, exacerbating climate risk for all countries.
The good news is that the number of countries announcing pledges to achieve net zero emissions continues to grow. Looking back over the past three decades, countries have already made significant efforts to decarbonize. Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first assessment report in 1990, individual policies and regulations around the world have sparked myriad decarbonization initiatives.
Now, as we forge a pathway to reduce the addition of greenhouse gases to net zero, we need to identify the policies that have provided the most effective solutions. This World Bank report, Reality Check: Lessons from 25 Policies Advancing a Low-Carbon
Future, fills a critical gap in the research to date, documenting policy trends for decarbonization, with a series of case studies across sectors and geographies. The 25 case studies presented here provide country context and policy or project details, examine results and impacts, and outline key takeaways and lessons learned for enabling further reductions around the world.
The case studies outlined in this report give us reason to hope. The rapid expansion of solar power in India, a growing market for climate-smart agriculture in China, greener financial systems in Colombia, and the removal of fossil fuel subsidies in the
Arab Republic of Egypt are the result of well-designed policies and successful implementation and provide evidence that, with the right mix of political support and policy design, we can decarbonize development. These policies are not necessarily the
first-best policies advocated by analysts and economists, and some may not be best practice. But they are real policies that have been implemented in countries with very different income levels and political contexts, and they provide many insights on how
countries can design and implement climate policies—and on the compromises that doing so can require.
The World Bank is sharing these case studies to inform current and future climate actions, but our work does not stop here. These case studies offer a useful snapshot of the current policy landscape, but they will be updated over time as policies evolve and improve and, hopefully, become more ambitious and more efficient. The case studies presented here also highlight a big gap in knowledge: most of them do not have a rigorous ex post assessment of their outcomes and performance, which would help
countries improve design and learn from each other. More work is definitely needed to make sure we learn from the early movers, and this will be a key priority for the World Bank moving forward.
Dr. Juergen Voegele
Vice President for Sustainable Development
World Bank
