Political economy of global climate neutrality

Using a political economy lens, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of the feasibility of three international climate policy initiatives: internationally transferable mitigation outcomes (ITMOs), carbon removals (CRs) and loss and damage (L&D) initiatives. We assess enabling factors as well as barriers along seven categories, ecological, economic, geo-physical, geo-political, institutional, socio-cultural, and technological. In doing so, we use multiple indicators that focus on various aspects of each dimension. Our results give a nuanced and consistently comparable picture of how different initiatives compare. We find considerable differences regarding the evaluation of the political feasibility of different options. L&D initiatives, based on our methodology, seem to be associated with strong enabling factors in terms of feasibility, particularly as far as geo-political, technological and economic indicators are concerned. That said, even though CRs possess technological and economic enablers, their feasibility is more constrained due to the presence of ecological, geo-political, institutional and social-cultural barriers that hamper their realization. The feasibility of Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) can be enabled based on ecological, geo-physical, and socio-cultural grounds; yet, we find that particularly for ITMOs the feasibility is highly dependent on the specific country context and cannot not clearly be assessed in a fully generalizable pattern. Generally, country-specific constraints will have a decisive impact upon the feasibility of specific initiatives and their contribution to international mitigation efforts.