Decentralized Voluntary Agreements Do Not Reduce Emissions in a Climate Change Experiment

Authors

• Alessandro Del Ponte, Chapman UniversityFollow
• Aidas Masiliūnas, University of Sheffield
• Noah Lim, National University of Singapore

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-29-2024

Abstract

Can climate accords based on decentralized and voluntary agreements successfully reduce carbon emissions? We designed an economic experiment to study the effectiveness of the best-known mechanisms to foster international cooperation on climate change mitigation: climate pledges, financial penalties, and peer evaluation. We test each mechanism both separately and together. In the climate pledge treatments, participants could pledge their desired emissions target, approved by majority vote. In the treatments with financial penalties, failure to meet pledges triggered monetary sanctions. In the peer evaluation treatments, participants could evaluate each other, which determined who would receive an additional nonmonetary environmental prize. We find that most participants joined climate agreements and met their pledges, but pledges were insufficiently ambitious. As a result, neither pledges, financial penalties, nor peer evaluation reduced emissions. These results question the effectiveness of decentralized and voluntary climate agreements, such as the Paris Agreement.

Comments

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Ecological Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Ecological Economics, volume 227, in 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108438

The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.

Recommended Citation

Del Ponte, A., Masiliunas, A., & Lim, N. (2025). Decentralized Voluntary Agreements Do Not Reduce Emissions in a Climate Change Experiment. Ecological Economics, 227, 108438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108438

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.