Oxford data shows continuing expansion of worldwide climate policies
Climate policies worldwide continue to expand, with Asia, Latin America, and Africa increasingly setting the pace on policy innovation, according to data released by the Oxford Climate Policy Monitor, which is now used by the UN’s Taskforce on Net Zero Policy.
The Oxford Climate Policy Monitor, led by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and Blavatnik School of Government, assesses how economic regulations align to climate goals around the world, allowing everyone to see what concrete laws and policies countries are putting in place to deliver on their net zero targets. The project is powered by a unique global network of 80 leading law firms working pro bono.
Today at COP31, the latest full dataset from the Monitor was released (open access and free to download), and the UN’s Taskforce on Net Zero Policy published Policy Matters: Charting a Path to Net Zero, which draws on data from the Monitor.
Thom Wetzer, Associate Professor of Law and Finance at the Faculty of Law, Director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, and co-director of the Oxford Climate Policy Hub, which produces the Monitor, says: “At COP31, geopolitical divisions risk dominating the headlines. But climate progress also depends on decisions made far from the negotiating table: the laws that shape investment, energy systems, and corporate behaviour. Our remarkable pro bono network of 80 leading law firms helps bring this less visible story into focus, revealing where governments continue to strengthen the legal foundations for the transition, and where important gaps remain.”
Thomas Hale, Professor in Global Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and co-director of the Oxford Climate Policy Hub, says: “Overall climate policy continues to advance across the G20, with retrenchment or dilution in some regions, like North America, more than offset by advancement in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Corporate and financial policy frameworks have continued to expand, both in the number of measures adopted and their overall ambition.”
In 2026, the analysis covers 39 countries (including all of the G20), representing more than 85% of global emissions and GDP.
Emma Lecavalier, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Climate Policy Hub at the Blavatnik School of Government, says: “The long view of climate policy is that it is becoming more ambitious (targeting faster, deeper emissions cuts); more comprehensive (covering a larger portion of the economy); and more real, with growing evidence of implementation.
“However, the stringency of climate policies – the extent to which they are mandatory and enforced – has seen slower growth.”
The data shows that ‘greenlash’ is real, and is focused in the Americas and Europe (particularly the USA), but is limited: across all the policies examined, 718 are unchanged, 45 delayed, 32 weakened, and only 11 repealed (with the USA accounting for 8 of those 11).
Policies to limit global warming
The Monitor looks at nine critical policy domains: climate-related disclosure, transition planning, public procurement, carbon credits (on which Bhavya Gupta and Thomas Hale at the Blavatnik School have published an additional policy brief), prudential rules, methane abatement, buildings, aviation, and trade.
Three of these policy domains are new this year. One is buildings, which account for 37% of global carbon emissions and rising. Another is aviation, which accounts for over 3% of global emissions. Another is trade measures, including positive or negative incentives related to the import of four clean technologies (batteries, electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics, and wind turbines). This is a topical geopolitical issue as countries try to move towards net zero without becoming too dependent on China, which dominates clean tech exports.
The UN’s Taskforce on Net Zero Policy draws on the Oxford data
The Taskforce on Net Zero Policy was established at COP28 in 2023 to advance the work of the UN High-Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities.
The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate adopted in 2015 under the umbrella of the UN, set a target to limit the global average temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
“The destination has not changed”, Selwin Hart, Special Advisor and Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change at the United Nations, said today while launching the Taskforce’s report drawing on the Oxford Climate Policy Monitor data. “Keeping 1.5°C within reach and achieving global net zero emissions as quickly as possible remain essential if we are to limit the scale and duration of climate overshoot. What is changing is the conversation around how we get there. Competitiveness, energy security and industrial strategy are increasingly being recognised not as reasons to slow the transition, but as powerful reasons to accelerate it.”
Hale and Wetzer note: “As the world seeks to limit the scale and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot, the focus must be on helping governments undergird their targets with ambitious and effective policies that are actually implemented on the ground.”
The Oxford Climate Policy Hub is a collaboration between the Blavatnik School of Government and the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme (which is a joint initiative of the Oxford Smith School and Oxford's Law Faculty). It is part of the Oxford Net Zero strategic cluster. It was launched in October 2023 as a direct output of the Oxford Martin Programme on Climate Policy.