How to use this resource

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. For more information on how we define the scope of what we include in the dataset, 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 by new technology built by our partners Climate Policy Radar. This includes a series of features and functionality to make it easier to explore the data.

• Find climate and climate-related laws, policies, strategies and action plans from every national government worldwide
• Search for keywords and policy concepts (like electric vehicles and blue hydrogen) across all of our documents
• See where your search term and related phrases appear in documents with our automatic highlighting tool
• Browse country profiles to find and compare their climate laws, policies and strategies
• Access our raw data: you just need to fill out our form to request a copy of our entire dataset.

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 credit our data. You will also need to fill out our form to receive a copy of the dataset as a .csv file.

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. You can help grow our database by telling us about any laws, policies or strategies that are missing using our data contributors form.

We have over 3,100 laws and policies in the database. This number is regularly updated as new data is entered.

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 (see our Methodology for further detail). 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 our form to request our entire dataset.

We limit the number of search results you’ll see to 100 so that you get the best performance from our system. 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 our 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. This work is verified by our team of humans and we’re working to improve it continually.

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.

Our 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 and share them through our resource. We’re working to improve this so that you can search through the full text of more documents in our database. If you think we’re missing some data, you can tell us about it using our 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 our 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.

For most laws and policies in the database, targets included in laws and policies have been manually identified. These include all types of targets, not just greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. 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. We’re working to develop new tools to improve our identification and display of targets. While we do this, we have paused the manual identification of all targets except for “net zero” targets or climate neutrality targets. You can request to download the full targets 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.