Item talk:Q1651

Rationale

Finding targets in climate policy documents is a critical step in identifying gaps, trends, and opportunities to accelerate climate action within and across jurisdictions. Identifying these targets typically involves a researcher sifting through thousands of documents manually, which is time consuming and prone to errors. As a result, the scale of this research is rarely comprehensive. We hope that this work enables users to explore the breadth and depth of climate-related national targets in greater detail, and to identify gaps, trends, and opportunities at scale.

Concept methodology

Targets are defined here as an aim to achieve something, rather than stating something concrete about the future. This means that a statement such as "It is anticipated that industrial production will increase by a minimum 4.6% annually" would not qualify as a target. Conversely, a statement such as "the Government will endeavour to reach a minimum level of 10% of electrical energy supplied to the grid from renewable sources" would qualify as a target.

A target must also be quantifiable. This may be numeric or non-numeric. For example, words like "all", "every", "double", "halve", "eradicate", "no", "none" and "independent of" refer to measurable quantities. This means that a statement such as "significantly decrease food waste to reduce emissions by the next decade" would not qualify as a target. Conversely, a statement such as "provide piped water supply to all rural households by 2024" would qualify as a target.

Finally, a target must be set with a clear deadline. It can be expressed through a specific end date or some other representation of an end date such as in reference to planning cycles or number of years. This means that a statement such as "reach energy efficiency savings of at least 2% on an annual basis" would not qualify as a target. Conversely, a statement such as "in the next ten years, we will add 100km of new bicycle lanes" would qualify as a target.

We also excluded statements which are: commitments to perform a policy action; analysis of a target; a commitment to set up a vague target in the future; an abstract reference to a target without information about what the target is; and, a commitment to achieve a target based on the fulfilment of certain conditions.

These definitions were used to create a dataset of high-quality, expert-annotated samples of national climate change laws and policies and UNFCCC submissions from climate-laws.org, published by public institutions only (e.g. government agencies and departments). This data was then used to train a classifier, which is designed to accurately predict whether a passage of text contains a target or not. For more information please see our targets methodology.

References & acknowledgements

The class definitions for hand-labelling are based on those in the ClimateBERT-NetZero study methodology, itself based on the Net Zero Tracker codebook. This builds on existing work by Net Zero Tracker and ClimateBERT to identify ‘Net-zero’ and ‘Emissions Reduction’ targets. We extended the definition to identify general quantified targets made by national governments in climate policy documents. We also expanded the Net-Zero and Emissions Reduction targets definitions to include different greenhouse gases (rather than just general greenhouse gas targets) and to include sector-specific targets (such as emissions reduction targets for the transport sector).