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You can use this resource to:
Watch the video below to learn how to use this resource
We’ve been working with our partners, Climate Policy Radar, to redesign and upgrade our legislation database, bringing you a better experience and new features to help you explore and interact with the data. You can now:
More features are coming soon. Stay updated to find out when we launch them.
Climate Change Laws of the World is a database covering national-level climate change legislation and policies from around the world. These laws and policies address policy areas directly relevant to climate change mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage or disaster risk management. More specifically, the database includes laws and policies that establish rules and procedures related to the transition to low-carbon economies, enhancing adaptation capabilities, and disaster risk management.
As of June 2023, the database includes documents submitted by Parties and non-Party stakeholders to the UNFCCC, including, among others, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Communications and Adaptation Communications, IPCC reports, and submissions to the first Global Stocktake (hereinafter: Submissions to the UNFCCC). (see FAQ ‘What UNFCCC documents are included?’). For more information please visit our Methodology section.
This database originates from a collaboration between the Grantham Research Institute and GLOBE International on a series of Climate Legislation Studies. Since then, Climate Change Laws of the World has transformed into one of the Grantham Research Institute’s core strategic projects, underpinning much of the Institute’s work on our governance and legislation theme.
The database is now powered and operated by our partner Climate Policy Radar.
These resources have the same data, features and functionality. The Grantham Research Institute and Climate Policy Radar are delivering these resources in partnership, using Climate Policy Radar's technology to help you get more out of Climate Change Laws of the World's data.
Yes - and we encourage you to do so! The content of our database is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY). Before doing so, you should read our Terms of Use for more information and to find out how to cite and credit the resources. If you wish to download the data as a .csv file, please fill out our form.
New data, and updates to existing data, are collected from official sources such as government websites, parliamentary records and court documents. We add these to the database on a rolling basis. Submissions to the UNFCCC portals were first added on the 23rd of May 2023, and are checked for updates regularly. If you’re aware of documents that are missing, please let us know using our data contributors form.
As of June 2023, the data includes 3,100 laws and policies in the database and over 1,700 Submissions to the UNFCCC portals. This number is regularly updated as new data is entered.
The database has over 1,700 Submissions to the UNFCCC that have been sourced from the following UNFCCC and related websites:
These include the following documents:
Documents that have been written by multiple Parties, or by one Party on behalf of a coalition/negotiating block, are given the geography profile label "International", which you can search for using the search bar. The specific countries that contributed to the document are captured in the ‘author’ field.
Some documents are submitted to the UNFCCC by non-state actors (also called non-Party stakeholders (labelled in the app as 'non-party'). These documents currently have no country assigned, and will be excluded from results when geography and region filters are applied. We will explore including location filters for non-state actors in the future.
The litigation data previously accessible through Climate Change Laws of the World stemmed from our ongoing partnership with The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The Sabin Center has been leading efforts to collect global litigation data since 2011. We are now working together to launch an enhanced version of the litigation database, with new features similar to our legislation database. The data will be available through an integrated global resource in the coming months. Sign up for our newsletter to hear about this update. In the meantime, you can access climate case documents at the Sabin Center’s Climate Change Litigation Databases website.
Climate Change framework laws are a subset of all laws and policies in the database. If you are interested in this subset of the data, please request a download of the full dataset. You can then filter this so you only see legislative documents (column L). From there you can filter for any entry that includes data in Column O on frameworks.
You’ll need to fill out this form to request our entire dataset.
The number of search results is currently limited to 100 to optimise system performance. We’re working to remove this limit.
‘Toggling’ (or clicking on) this option in the sidebar will narrow down your search to only show documents that include the exact words you typed in the search bar. However, this means a search for ‘electric vehicles’ wouldn’t pick up ‘EVs’ in the text, for example.
If you don’t toggle (or click on) ‘exact phrase only’, our new search feature searches the database for similar and related terms to the query you typed into the search bar. This means you’ll get a richer search experience, as often climate or policy concepts are described in different ways by the government actors and policymakers producing the documents (such as petrol cars, internal combustion engine vehicles, gasoline-powered cars, etc). This feature relies on a technique called natural language processing, which trains computers to understand text and the meaning of words and phrases in context. Climate Policy Radar’s team of policy experts is working to continually improve the performance and accuracy of the models, and to make them more domain-specific.
After conducting a search in the search bar, you can click on various features in the sidebar to the left of the page to narrow down your results. These features include showing ‘only exact matches’ (i.e. only searching the database for the precise words entered into the search bar), regions of the world where laws and policies have been published, specific jurisdictions (or countries), and date ranges for when documents have been published. This can help you narrow down and find accurate results more quickly.
This feature shows you where your search term or relevant text appears in a document. For PDF documents, you’ll see the passage of text highlighted in yellow. We are currently working on developing this for HTML.
This feature is made possible thanks to technology developed by Climate Policy Radar, which uses an AI technique called natural language processing to identify similar and related words and phrases. This means you can find information relevant to your search query even if it’s described in a slightly different way in the text of documents. Find out more about how natural language processing works.
Our search feature looks for where your search term, or related phrases, appear in the text of documents. It looks across the title, summary, and the body text of the document. This feature tells you where our search tool has found your query in relevant documents.
We’re working on making all documents in our database fully searchable - meaning our tool will scan all of the documents’ text to find references to your search query. For those published in different languages and HTML sources, this will take longer, which is why some don't yet allow full text search. For these documents, search is available on the title and summary. This will be resolved very soon.
A small minority of our documents aren't yet machine-readable, meaning our tool can’t extract their text and make it searchable. In these instances our tool will look for matches to your search term in the documents’ title and summary. To access the full text you’ll be taken to the document’s source. We’re working to resolve this soon.
The database is not exhaustive. We don’t have access to some law and policy documents, while others aren’t currently machine-readable, meaning we can’t extract the text from them. We’re working to improve this so that you can search through the full text of more documents in the database. If you think we’re missing some data, you can tell us about it using the data contribution form.
We also limit the number of matches you can see in a document to 10 so that you get the best performance from the tool. This means you might miss some matches. We’re working on a way to remove this limit.
While we work on developing shareable links, the best way to share documents is by using the URL of a document page.
You can also share documents by downloading and then attaching them to an email. To download a document, click the ‘download’ button when viewing the document on our tool. You can also click the three horizontal dots on the top right of a document view, and download the PDF from there.
You can get in touch with the Climate Policy Radar team via email at support@climatepolicyradar.org. We appreciate you taking the time to do this!
We’d love to hear about this! Please tell us using our data contribution form.
Quantified policy targets included in laws and policies (such as ‘reduce emissions by X% by year 2030), have been manually identified for most laws and policies in the database. These include various targets, including greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, renewables targets, adaptation-related stargets, and more. Targets for individual documents are displayed on the document page. You can also see all targets identified in the laws and policies of any given country on the country page. Climate Policy Radar is developing automated algorithms for identification and display of targets. While we do this, we have paused the manual identification of targets in new laws and policies. We still identify “net zero” targets and climate neutrality targets. You can request to download the dataset by clicking the ‘Request to download all target data (.csv)’ button at the top of any list of targets, and filling out the form.
Our current database includes documents from every national government. Including subnational and city-level data is part of our planned expansion. So if you’re aware of datasets you think we should include as part of this, please let us know using our data contribution form.
Documents are translated to English using Google’s Cloud Translation API. While the quality of auto-translation does not always capture full meaning and nuance from the original language, we hope it serves as a first step to improve accessibility. We are planning to add auto-translation to other languages in the future, as well as to improve the quality of translation using other, potentially domain specific, models.
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