Event Summary: How the OECD's Climate Policy Database Can Help Us Make Sense of the Global Policy Landscape

Last week we had the great pleasure of welcoming two experts, Dirk Röttgers and Nathan Ducrocq, from the OECD's Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA), who presented a practical guide to their innovative Climate Policy Database to students and researchers at Sciences Po.

What is IFCMA?

Launched in 2023, the IFCMA brings together 60 countries in a member-driven forum built on equal footing participation and consensus-based decision-making, combining expertise from climate, economic, and tax policy communities. Its key aim is to enable mutual learning through better evidence across three areas: countries' implemented mitigation and mitigation-relevant policies and their design features; the impact of mitigation policies on emissions and other outcomes; and the carbon intensity of products and sectors. Beyond the Climate Policy Database, IFCMA also assesses policy impact by modelling domestic effects on emissions, analysing international spillovers, and reviewing empirical evidence, as well as developing product-level carbon intensity metrics and solutions for their computation and widespread use.

The Climate Policy Database

The Climate Policy Database currently covers 43 policy types and holds over 1,600 individual policy instruments across around 40 countries that have actively validated the data. The instruments are classified into categories including economic, regulatory and information instruments, government investment and consumption, and voluntary approaches. Each entry is structured to include not only a comprehensive description of the instrument, but also administrative information, the policy base and intensity, instrument-specific attributes, and — crucially — the compliance mechanisms in place.

The experts also provided guidance on how to make the most of the database's interactive dashboard, which offers, for example, country-level overview of policies and allows users to explore the full depth of descriptive data for each instrument category. The policy mix of each country can be browsed in detail: the presenters drew on examples such as renewable electricity support policies, renewable production policies, and road use taxation to illustrate the dashboard's capabilities. Greenhouse gas emission coverage can also be displayed for each instrument, with clear visualisations helping users explore the characteristics and overlaps of instruments. 

A practical tool for researchers

The database is constantly being updated and improved: Further inclusion of economic and non-economic instruments is planned, and geographic coverage continues to expand.

For students and researchers, the Climate Policy Database is a valuable resource: comprehensive in scope yet intuitive to navigate, it offers a structured and reliable entry point into the complex landscape of climate mitigation policy across the globe. Whether you are mapping a country's policy mix, comparing instrument design across jurisdictions, or tracing the coverage of specific greenhouse gases, the database provides the depth and flexibility to support rigorous analysis.