Climate Policy Radar and Grantham Research Institute launch revamped research resource

We’re delighted to launch our upgraded version of the Climate Change Laws of the World database, offering new tools and features to make it easier to understand and analyse the global climate law and policy landscape.

Climate Policy Radar and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE have partnered to deliver the resource, which gives people free access to climate laws and policies from all over the world, and a suite of features to help explore them.

The new features, which harness machine learning and natural language processing techniques, have been developed by Climate Policy Radar. They allow you to now search the full text of documents in the database, consisting of thousands of climate laws and policies from every country.

For example you can search for “adaptation finance” or “subsidies for electric vehicles” and see all the documents that mention these terms and related phrases.

You’ll also see where these appear in documents, with relevant passages of text automatically highlighted in yellow, making it quicker and easier to find information (see the screengrab below).

We’re continuing to work together to add new tools and data to this upgraded resource.

New data

Soon you’ll be able to access and search through documents submitted to the UNFCCC, including nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and submissions under the first Global Stocktake - a Paris Agreement process designed to ‘take stock’ of progress towards its goals.

And in the coming months, we’ll be working with partners at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University to provide searchable climate litigation cases, drawing on over a decade of data collection led by the Sabin Center.

New features

Very soon we will integrate an automatic language translation feature that will provide English versions of documents published in any language. This will mean that you can search for a term (like “solar energy” or “carbon tax”) in English and find results from documents written in different languages, plus an English translation.

We’re also working to provide automatically generated summaries of documents, saving time and effort.

In addition, we’re designing and experimenting with new ways to explore our database, including interactive maps and visualisations.

Sign up for our newsletter to stay updated with the latest developments and upgrades, and give us your thoughts to help us design them. You can also let us know about any datasets that are missing from our resource.