Evidence Based Climate Policy: What works, for whom and when?

Talk summary

Limiting global warming to well below 2°C requires swift and effective climate policies. However, science assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlight our limited understanding of what policy solutions work, under what conditions, for whom and how. Rigorously synthesizing the insights from thousands of primary evaluations can improve climate policy practice just as collectivized evidence has transformed clinical guidance in health. In the talk I will highlight examples of this evidence-based approach to climate policy and highlight the efforts that are being made to synthesize evidence using community resources and the latest machine learning approaches.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Tarun Khanna, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

I am the Assistant Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and a visiting researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Climate Change in Berlin. I am interested in the economics of the energy sector and the incentives needed to create low carbon energy systems. My wider research interests include evidence synthesis, policy evaluation, electricity markets, and the role of clean energy in development. Before turning to academia, I was a policy practitioner. I worked with regulators, governments, and utilities in the design and implementation of electricity policy in South Asia.