Assessing Political Manifestos for Climate Change

A new process for evaluating political parties’ manifestos for climate mitigation

Many voters in many countries accept that climate change is more important and more urgent than other political drivers – yet governments all around the world have consistently failed to act forcefully and quickly enough to turn the tide. The imminent elections could be an opportunity to change this – but only if voters have the information they need to rank political parties coherently with regard to climate-change policies. Jason Palmer (Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd, Cambridge Energy, University College London) describes a process for assessing political parties' manifestos for action on climate mitigation.

This year, 2024, is a critical time for democracy around the world: 60 countries, accounting for around half of the global pollution, are having elections (Statista, 2024). It is also a critical time for reducing the most devastating impacts of climate change. The UN’s Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell says we have only “two years to save the world” (Steill/UN, 2024). The 1.5C threshold agreed in the Paris Agreement was breached for a full 12 months to February 2024 (BBC, 2024) and there remains little doubt about the need for urgent action if our children and grandchildren are to avoid the most pernicious outcomes of the climate crisis.

Party manifestos are an established vehicle for politicians to articulate what they would do if they were successful in elections. It would be naïve to assume that parties and politicians actually follow through on all of the pledges and commitments they make in their manifestos, but they are clear statements of intent. Voters and the press can hold governments to account if they fail to deliver the promises they made in manifestos, and political parties think long and hard about what they will write in their manifestos [1].

This article seeks to lay out a methodical, ‘scientific’ means of evaluating the climate-change policies of party manifestos in a pre-election period. It was prompted by an approach from VoteClimate [2], a UK non-governmental organisation set up to encourage voters to commit to voting for the party with the strongest climate-change policies that can win their seat – in the hope this would motivate all political parties to that this more seriously and raise their game. VoteClimate commissioned me to examine all the party manifestos and work out which would provide the strongest support for climate-change mitigation (adaptation was secondary).

Inevitably in the pre-election period, timing was very tight, with uncertainties about exactly when parties would publish their manifestos, and only 2-3 weeks between most of the manifestos coming out and the date of the election. VoteClimate wanted to provide information to voters and ideally a ranking well in advance of the election – partly to inform voters who vote by post, who need to act well before polling day.

The article then lays out a heavily-condensed summary of the review undertaken of UK manifestos. This process can be adapted in other countries. The full review will be published shortly [3].

Methods

There are no published accounts in the literature with systematic assessments of political manifestos for their climate-change policies. This is an under-researched field. This is good and bad. Good because it means there is flexibility to innovate and approach the task with a fresh eye. But bad because there were no precedents. This magnified time pressures as a method had to be defined and implemented in little more than 10 days.

Inevitably, there were compromises.

Initially, with VoteClimate, the intention was to separately identify every individual policy cited in each manifesto with a bearing on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Then to set up a fully referenced spreadsheet, using published sources with strong evidence and to calculate or model likely savings, including uncertainty ranges. However, across the manifestos of the seven parties in the UK, each with between eight and 50 different climate-change policies, there were around 200 such pledges. Early work suggested that proper quantitative modelling like this would take an average of around 3 hours per policy, and it would not be possible to do this [4].

Instead, I decided to conduct a more qualitative approach, using more expert judgement and experience of my past work on energy and GHG emissions, and banding of policies as ‘high’, ‘medium’, or ‘low’ savings. Here is a step-by description of the tasks involved:

1. Read Introductory sections of each manifesto, sections explicitly addressing climate change (variously described as ‘Climate Change’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘Energy’, ‘Planning’, ‘Transport’, ‘Land Use’, and ‘Agriculture/Farming’), and closing sections including any technical or financial appendices.
2. Draw out and summarise contextual information from each manifesto, using verbatim quotes where possible, to situate each party’s climate-change policies in each party’s overall agenda for Government.
3. Draw out, summarise and tabulate all policies affecting emissions from each manifesto, with an emphasis on quantifying any policies (e.g. percentage of renewable electricity generation, or number of homes insulated), and particularly the timeline of policies and costing. (My assumption was that clear costings of policies and deadlines for completion can be interpreted as more serious and more likely to happen than ambiguous ‘aspirations’ or statements of ‘preferred’ courses of action.)
4. Highlight in bold policies with the largest likely impact on emissions – often (but not always) policies with the largest financial budgets attached to them.
5. Identify policies that are unrealistically ambitious (e.g. in the UK, retrofitting 5 million additional dwellings in 5 years, from cold – where the supply side for retrofit is already constrained, and skills shortages can only be overcome over periods measured in years).
6. Define threshold limits for what constitutes ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ in terms of quantified GHG emissions. These should be standardised so it is possible to compare between policies and total savings by each party. (In this case thresholds are defined for ‘Total UK savings’ and ‘Savings per household affected’, and all of these were savings by 2030 – but other thresholds and timelines are possible. I set UK Impact <2% of total national emissions = low, 2-10% = medium, and >10% = high. For Household Impact, <10% of total emissions from households affected = low, 10-50% = medium, and >50% = high. In retrospect the ‘high’ thresholds may have been too high because very few policies qualified.)
7. Identify policies that will actually raise GHG emissions (e.g. stopping new nuclear power stations) and flag these in the tables.
8. Identify an authoritative and independent source describing what manifestos should say on climate change, if possible, and use this as a matrix assessment to show which manifestos are/are not covering the ground they should. (In this case the criteria from the environmental non-government organisation Greenpeace were used. I had intended to use criteria from the Climate Change Committee – the UK Government’s independent advisor/watchdog on climate change – but I was unable to find anything suitable).
9. Rank the parties using the emissions savings indicated by high/medium/low criteria, and more detailed quantitative calculations where parties were very close. Include in the ranking two or three stand-out policies from each party.

Limitations

The single most serious weakness in this approach is that it relies on the expert judgement of just one person. To address this, two other experts checked my ratings of each policy, and some were revised as a result.[5]

The second big limitation is around timings for implementation and impact of policies. Some policies can be introduced and have an impact very quickly (say, raising passenger duties on airline tickets). Conversely, other policies will take much longer to make an impact (e.g. stopping the granting of new licences for oil and gas exploration, or committing to build another 40GW of offshore wind), and even then initial savings may be low despite savings by 2100 being very large. Still others may take a very long time to introduce, and then ramp up very slowly – even though the aggregate savings by 2100 might be very large (take zero-carbon new homes, for example, not least because new homes built each year account for less than 1% of the stock of existing buildings in the UK).

In an ideal world with unlimited resources, it would have been better to estimate GHG savings over different time horizons – perhaps 2030, 2040, 2040, 2100 – for each policy.

Other weaknesses include the focus of most manifesto commitments (and therefore this analysis) are about climate change mitigation. It would be possible in future (or for countries where adaptation is more pressing) to use a similar approach to evaluate adaptation policies. Similarly, climate justice questions are largely overlooked in current batch of manifestos: scarcely anything about how helping the most vulnerable people through the multiple anguishes of a changing climate, or about helping countries in the Global South to transition to low carbon. These criteria could be added to the evaluation, where and when this is appropriate for manifestos under scrutiny.

A counter-argument here is that broadening the analysis like this would make it more complex. There are benefits (certainly in expediency and limiting the resources required to undertake a review) in keeping it simple and focused.

Extract from UK Review

This is the final ranking and stand-out policies from the UK review:

And here is the review of one of the UK parties (the Labour Party, which is widely predicted to win the UK election with a large majority, although the climate-change policies are weaker than those of the Greens).

Labour

The Labour Manifesto outlines six ‘first steps for change’, where Number 4 is setting up ‘Great British Energy’: a publicly-owned clean power company the party says will cut bills for good and boost energy security, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas companies. This is part of a wider programme of work they call the Green Prosperity Plan, which will include:

• investing in insulation and renewables in homes
• a ‘National Wealth Fund’, which will invest in ‘gigafactories’ to make batteries for electric vehicles and carbon capture and green hydrogen – as well as traditional industries like steel and ports
• the British Jobs Bonus, which they say will incentivise firms to offer good jobs.

Overall, they claim their Green Prosperity Plan will create 650,000 jobs by 2030.

The Labour Manifesto includes breakdowns of revenue and costs for their policies from 2028-29, with separate funding tables for the Green Prosperity Plan and changes to spending by Government departments. They say their fiscal rules will apply to every decision, and the current budget must move into balance. (By 2028-29 the figures show public services will be £2.5bn in credit – lower Government borrowing than now.)

Labour’s figures indicate about a quarter of the Green Prosperity Plan will be paid for from the windfall tax on oil and gas company profits, with the rest coming from borrowing ‘within fiscal rules’

*The timing of many Labour policies is unclear in the Labour Manifesto, and only a minority are commitments in the first parliament. These are marked ‘in the next parliament’ in the table. The last two pledges do not need Government funding. All comparisons here are against the counterfactual of current Government policies and focused on emissions savings by 2030.

Notes

[1] In the UK 2024 election one of the major parties (the Scottish National Party) had not published its manifesto even two weeks before election day – presumably, because of internal wrangles about what it would say.

[2] https://voteclimate.uk/

[3] The full UK review will be published on www.cambridgeenergy.org.uk on 20^th June 2024.

[4] Note however that VoteClimate are still working on this, and they may publish a more detailed, more accurate quantitative evaluation of emissions cuts before polling day.

[5] I am grateful to VoteClimate and Peter Roscoe (UCL Energy Institute and the Building Stock Lab) for their work to check my ratings of each policy. Also, thanks to Ian Cooper of Eclipse Research Consultants for reading an early draft of the full report.

References

BBC. (2024). Climate change: The 1.5C threshold explained. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231130-climate-crisis-the-15c-global-warming-threshold-explained

Statista. (2024.) Global elections in 2024 – Statistics & Facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/12221/global-elections-in-2024/#topicOverview

Steill, S / UNFCC. (2024) Two years to save the world: Simon Stiell at Chatham House. https://unfccc.int/news/two-years-to-save-the-world-simon-stiell-at-chatham-house

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