Climate Policy Consulting

After spending three decades in the aerospace industry, I’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is for different sectors to learn from each other. We no longer can afford to stay stuck in our own bubbles. Take the aerospace industry, for example. They’ve been looking at how car manufacturers automate their factories to improve their own processes. And those racing teams? Their ability to prototype quickly and develop at a breakneck pace is something we can all learn from to speed up our product development. It’s all about breaking down those silos and embracing new ideas from wherever we can find them. When I was leading the Scorpion Jet program, our rapid development – less than two years to develop a new aircraft – caught the attention of a company known for razors and electric shavers. They reached out to us, intrigued by our ability to iterate so quickly, telling me "you developed a new jet faster than we can develop new razors..." They wanted to learn how we managed to streamline our processes. It was quite an unexpected and fascinating experience that underscored the value of looking beyond one’s own industry can lead to significant improvements and efficiencies, even in fields as seemingly unrelated as aerospace and consumer electronics. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever for industries to break out of their silos and look to other sectors for fresh ideas and processes. This kind of cross-industry learning not only fosters innovation but also helps stay competitive in a rapidly changing market. For instance, the aerospace industry has been taking cues from car manufacturers to improve factory automation. And the automotive companies are adopting aerospace processes for systems engineering. Meanwhile, both sectors are picking up tips from tech giants like Apple and Google to boost their electronics and software development. And at Siemens, we partner with racing teams. Why? Because their knack for rapid prototyping and fast-paced development is something we can all learn from to speed up our product development cycles. This cross-pollination of ideas is crucial as industries evolve and integrate more advanced technologies. By exploring best practices from other industries, companies can find innovative new ways to improve their processes and products. After all, how can someone think outside the box, if they are only looking in the box? If you are interested in learning more, I suggest checking out this article by my colleagues Todd Tuthill and Nand Kochhar where they take a closer look at how cross-industry learning are key to developing advanced air mobility solutions. https://lnkd.in/dK3U6pJf

🌍 We Can’t Afford to Get Climate Policy Wrong—A Look at the Data Behind What Really Works 🌍 In the race against time to combat climate change, bold promises are everywhere. But here’s the critical question: Are the policies being implemented actually reducing emissions at the scale we need? A groundbreaking study published in Science, cuts through the noise and delivers the insights we desperately need. Evaluating 1,500 climate policies from around the world, the research identifies the 63 most effective ones—policies that have delivered tangible, significant reductions in emissions. What’s striking is that the most successful strategies often involve combinations of policies, rather than single initiatives. Think of it as the ultimate teamwork: when policies like carbon pricing, renewable energy mandates, and efficiency standards are combined thoughtfully, the impact is far greater than any one policy could achieve on its own. It’s a powerful reminder that for climate solutions the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, the study’s use of counterfactual emissions pathways is a game changer. By showing what would have happened without these policies, it provides a clear, quantifiable measure of their effectiveness. This is exactly the kind of rigorous evaluation we need to ensure that every policy counts, especially when we’re working against the clock. If we’re serious about meeting the Paris Agreement’s targets, we need to focus on what works—and this research offers a clear roadmap. Let’s champion policies that have proven to make a difference, because we don’t have time to waste on anything less. 🔗 Full study in the comments #ClimateAction #Sustainability #PolicyEffectiveness #ParisAgreement #NetZero #ClimateScience

Who's Afraid of Policy Experiments? Our paper – which has now been accepted 🎉 for publication in The Economic Journal – shows that voters strongly support randomized policy experiments, and particularly so when they do not hold a strong opinion about the policy. When learning about voters' favorable opinion, politicians conform to voters' views about policy experimentation. Full paper: https://lnkd.in/eHY8Qd23 (Open Access!) Joint work with Arjan Non, Paul Prottung, and Benedetta Ricci. Abstract: In many public policy areas, randomized policy experiments can greatly contribute to our knowledge of the effects of policies and can thus help to improve public policy. However, policy experiments are not very common. This paper studies whether a lack of appreciation for policy experiments among voters may be the reason for this. Collecting survey data representative of the Dutch electorate, we find clear evidence contradicting this view. Voters strongly support policy experimentation and particularly so when they do not hold a strong opinion about the policy. In a subsequent survey experiment among a selected group of Dutch politicians, we find that politicians conform their expressed opinion about policy experiments to what we tell them the actual opinion of voters is.

If Public Policy is meant to be hands-on, shouldn’t public policy research be that too? Too often, I see policy students buried in secondary data, producing neat reports from government websites or the World Bank database. Useful? Sure. But if that’s all we needed, the economists and sociologists already had it covered. Public policy as a discipline was born to be pragmatic; to reflect ground realities instead of only theorizing them. And yet, much of our research still feels like “watch-and-wait” instead of “test-and-learn.” Here’s the truth: our knowledge gaps about how things work on the ground are still enormous. Policy isn’t failing because we don’t have enough PDFs; it’s failing because too few people are running real-world experiments. What we desperately need is more action-oriented, experimental research. Think of examples like: >Testing whether SMS reminders improve pension enrollment in one taluka before scaling. >Trying two grievance redressal systems in different districts and comparing results. >Piloting cash vs. in-kind transfers to see which impacts nutrition better. This is how public policy builds knowledge that actually works in messy, real contexts. And here’s the encouraging part: you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a million-dollar grant to do this. Even as a student or early-career professional, you can start small: 3 steps to move from “desk-based” to “hands-on” research: ~Start with micro-experiments. Pick a small public program in your city/village. Test something measurable. It could be as simple as comparing how two different posters influence awareness about a scheme. ~Collaborate with NGOs/startups. They are often open to researchers testing small innovations. You get access to the field, they get actionable insights. Win-win. ~Document and share. Publish your findings (even if modest) as short blogs, LinkedIn posts, or working papers. Remember: visibility attracts collaboration, and collaboration creates larger projects. Here’s the mindset shift: don’t wait for the perfect dataset. Create the dataset. So, to every MPP student, researcher, or young professional: step beyond Excel sheets and borrowed numbers. Immerse yourself. Run pilots. Shadow a government department. Collect primary data. Learn by doing. Because policy isn’t guesswork but if we don’t generate evidence rooted in lived reality, guesswork is all we’ll ever have. What’s one experiment you’d love to test if you had the chance? #PublicPolicy #Research #Impact #PolicyEducation #Evidence #LearningByDoing

Rolling back clean energy policies to save European industry will backfire. Whilst it may seem attractive in the short term it is poor industrial policy in the long term. The latest attempts of Germany to once again derail European regulation on the phase-out of the internal combustion engine fall into this category. In my remarks at the European Council this week, I emphasised that standing still (or even moving backwards) on climate and clean energy policies is not a path to industrial strength — it’s a risk to Europe’s competitiveness. European industries need stability, clarity, and long-term direction to invest confidently in the technologies of the future. Policy uncertainty discourages innovation and diverts investment to other regions offering clearer signals. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not standing still. If Europe hesitates now, it risks losing ground in the global race for the industries of tomorrow. Staying the course on climate ambition is not just about reaching net zero — it’s about ensuring Europe remains an industrial leader in the 21st century economy.

Caring about climate is not enough. It never was. A major review just published in Nature Climate Change, by Kelly Fielding and Matthew Hornsey, makes this case with unusual clarity. Across 125 countries, strong majorities express willingness to act on climate. Yet actual behavior remains stubbornly low. The gap between intention and action is not a communication failure. It is a systems failure. The review proposes a tripartite framework of mechanisms that explain why climate-friendly intentions so rarely translate into behavior: intrapersonal, social, and structural. Intrapersonal mechanisms include cognitive biases, emotion-based drivers, and behavioral habits. Our brains are wired for immediacy, not for diffuse, long-term threats. We discount future costs. We underestimate how much regret we will feel for inaction. We overestimate how inconvenient change will be. Social mechanisms involve norms, identity, and visibility. We look to others to calibrate what is normal, what is acceptable, what is worth doing. When climate action is invisible or socially risky, intentions collapse. And then there are structural mechanisms, the ones that politics consistently ignores. Cost. Convenience. Institutional trust. These are not soft variables. They are the architecture within which all individual motivation either succeeds or fails. You can have the strongest climate intention in the world and still be blocked by infrastructure that makes the sustainable option slower, more expensive, and less reliable. This is where the review gets politically uncomfortable. Self-reported intentions explained only 5% of the variance in actual pro-environmental behavior. Five percent. The remaining 95% is shaped by the systems people inhabit, not the values they hold. From an Eco-Affective Health perspective, this matters enormously. We have spent decades trying to change minds. The evidence says we also need to change cities, supply chains, financial systems, and governance structures. Affect, motivation, and identity are real forces, but they operate inside structural containers that either enable or constrain them. Closing the intention-behavior gap is not a psychology project. It is a political project that needs psychology. The intervention toolbox is there. Implementation intentions, peer modelling, block leaders, default green options, financial incentives, participatory governance. Effect sizes are documented. The knowledge exists. What is missing is the political will to deploy it at scale. Article link: https://lnkd.in/dhemQvSc Follow our work at ewahlab.com #EWAHLab #EcoAffectiveHealth #ClimateAction #BehaviorChange #ClimatePolitics #PlanetaryHealth #ClimateMentalHealth #EnvironmentalPsychology #GlobalMentalHealth #SystemsChange

An important and timely intervention in the UK as climate experts organise a National Emergency Briefing for more than 1,000 people including politicans, business leaders, senior civil servants and civic leaders to set out the scale of the climate and biodiversity crises and to reset the national conversation on these issues, especially in the face of growing misinformation. Nine experts gave stark assessments of the scale of the changes needed to adapt the country to the rapidly changing climate and ecological situation, and to potentially stave off the worst potential outcomes. The briefing examined critical issues such as food security and inequality, and scientific leaders from security, health, and finance sectors warned that climate and nature breakdown represent compounding, systemic risks, the kind that can fracture markets and exceed the resilience of states. “We are facing a national emergency not only because the climate is changing, but because the living systems that protect the climate are breaking down. This isn’t about choosing between the economy and the environment. It’s about recognising that the economy is embedded within the environment, and that the health of the nation depends on the living systems that sustain us.” Nathalie Seddon, Professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford. It is vital that these conversations happen. Climate targets are not abstract numbers on a page, they are the difference between stable societies and escalating disruption. Without an honest, shared understanding of the risks, the scale of action required is easy to underestimate. Grounding the discussion in evidence turns distant targets into real decisions about how we safeguard society and the environment. https://lnkd.in/e3CXawT8 National Emergency Briefing

𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞'𝐬 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨 𝐁𝐞 Climate action in Europe faces key tests in 2026, as the Financial Times rightly argues ( 👉 https://lnkd.in/ecjnARNP). The EU's carbon border tax just kicked in. Large-scale solar and wind projects are being commissioned. New disclosure rules force companies to come clean about emissions. And yet, the political narrative remains dominated by fear. Fear of voter backlash. Fear that ambitious climate policy is electoral suicide. That fear is based on a systematic misperception of what citizens actually want. Research published this week ( 👉 https://lnkd.in/eYth6q26 ) shows UK MPs think only 16% of their constituents support local renewable energy projects. The actual figure? 73%. That is not a small error. That is politicians living in a parallel universe. This aligns with a little older academic research on Belgian politicians ( 👉 https://lnkd.in/eb9pADUV), who consistently overestimate how right-wing their voters are by an average of 13 percentage points. On banning polluting cars from cities, they underestimated public support by 12 points. On every left-wing policy proposal tested, politicians assumed less support than actually existed. The pattern holds across all parties. Left, center, right: all suffer from the same bias. Why does this matter? Because perception shapes action. Politicians who believe voters oppose climate measures will water them down or abandon them. We are trapped in what researchers call a "spiral of silence": 𝟖𝟗% of people worldwide want stronger climate action, but most do not know they are part of a majority ( 👉 https://lnkd.in/ewaiRjRY). With the US retreating, European leadership becomes more critical. Not only for a sustainable future, but also for strategic autonomy. The technology exists. Public support is there. What is missing is political courage, based on a misreading of what citizens want. 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬: 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐯𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐲.

From weeks of extreme heat in Perth to storms and bushfires in Victoria, and yet another cyclone headed our way, the ongoing spate of extreme weather across Australia has again demonstrated that the world has become more hazardous as a consequence of global warming. The reshaping of patterns of life in Australia by unnatural disasters has been primarily caused by fossil fuel corporations; the burning of coal, oil and gas is the number one cause of climate change. As climate impacts worsen, the solutions that we’ve had to deal with disasters are rapidly becoming unfit for purpose. A new approach is needed, founded on the best of our national character, taking courage from community response to disasters, and inspiration from the great democratic and economic reforms of Australian history. Increased national resilience should begin with prevention. The malign influence of fossil fuel corporations on our democracy, society and economy must be overcome so that we can rapidly transition away from coal, oil and gas to renewables. But even if we do everything right from here, the world has changed - and Australia must respond to that. We need a new national paradigm to safeguard people, now and in the future. The idea of universalism—that every human life is precious and deserving of the chance of full flourishing, and that this can only be truly guaranteed within a healthy environment—must be at the core of our response. We need a universal safety net response to climate damage. People cannot be left to fend for themselves in the face of worsening storms, fires and floods. And private market mechanisms - principally insurance - are simply not fit for purpose to cope with current and future impacts. Some principles that could underpin this paradigm shift include: 🌏 Stopping the problem at the source: Rapidly transitioning away from coal, oil and gas, and ending deforestation. 🌏 Urgent planning and preparing for climate impacts to get people and vital infrastructure out of harm's way as much as possible. 🌏 Ensuring adequate standalone resources for immediate disaster response. 🌏 Building a national system of environmental protection to give nature the best chance of resilience in a climate damaged world. 🌏 The creation of a universal climate security safety net, to ensure that no Australian is left behind by climate disasters.  🌏 Centering climate resilience within Australian foreign policy with particular focus on supporting the future flourishing of the Pacific family of nations. 🌏 Deepening our democracy and revitalising our public institutions to ensure that the wellbeing and security of people, not the profits of big polluters, determine the priorities of our country. How do you think Australia can ensure care for everyone here in an age of worsening climate disasters? Would love to hear from you in the comments. https://lnkd.in/g4C3Jibs

The climate transition is not à la carte. For companies, the strength of your position depends on the consistency of your commitment. Earlier this month, more than 100 companies and investors across Europe signed an open letter supporting the EU Emissions Trading System. This included major players such as EDF, Ørsted, Vattenfall, Tata Group, Volvo Cars and Ingka Group | IKEA. Their arguments – and their decision to intervene publicly – should give pause, particularly as several member states are pushing to weaken the ETS in response to rising energy prices. The ETS is a highly effective policy. It has cut emissions by around 50% in the sectors it covers, while those sectors have continued to grow significantly over the same period. It works because it provides a credible, stable long-term carbon price that companies can plan and invest against. The ETS is being made a scapegoat for a structural vulnerability it did not create. Weakening it will not solve Europe’s competitiveness challenges, but it will reduce investment certainty and make industrial planning more difficult. The issue is not the carbon price, but Europe’s dependence on imported fossil fuels – the main source of energy price volatility, and precisely what the ETS is helping to reduce. The companies that have spoken out understand what is at stake. They have been planning against this framework for years. It is right that they have intervened – and I commend them for it. But it is not enough to speak out only when the instrument that directly affects your business comes under pressure. The risk for Europe’s climate framework is not that it will be undone in a single moment. It is incremental rollback, as measures are weakened one by one and a narrative takes hold – largely unchallenged – that climate policy is to blame for complex economic challenges. When due diligence requirements or transition planning rules are weakened in the name of simplification, the overall framework becomes less coherent and harder to defend. If your business depends on the successful decarbonisation of the economy, cherry-picking is not an efficient strategy. Defending a particular policy, in this case the ETS, will be harder if the framework in which it sits – and the logic on which it rests – has been undermined elsewhere. If you’re consistently advocating more ambitious climate policies, customers and policymakers will be much more inclined to believe your commitments and listen to your warnings. For businesses, decarbonisation is not about morality but about backing a stabilising force in an increasingly volatile world. Standing on the precipice of another energy crisis, we are reminded again how dangerous our dependence on fossil fuel is. So if you are willing to take on the challenges ahead, you should know it is not à la carte. But it is the best way forward. And please, say it out loud. Paul Polman The B Team We Mean Business Coalition