Living, systematic review ecosystem for understanding what climate policies work

Having the best evidence available on what works under what conditions and why is critical for enhanced climate action and progress towards the Paris Agreement. In this presentation we deal with three fundamental challenges for building a rigorous evidence base for evidence-based climate policy. First, there is an evidence synthesis gap in climate policy evaluation, i.e. there is little synthesis of available ex-post policy evaluations using rigorous systematic review methods. Second, rigorous systematic reviews are usually limited to evaluating climate policies in one outcome dimension, but policymakers have a more comprehensive outcome demand. For example, knowing about the effectiveness of carbon pricing is an important piece of information, but policymakers also need to know about impacts on innovation dynamics, labor market, competitiveness and so on. Third, there is a disconnect in the timing of the provision of evidence, i.e. the evidence is usually not available when policymakers need it. Here we introduce the concept of living systematic review ecosystems as a paradigm for evidence-based climate policy. We address how this concept could be applied in a community effort to build a rigorous evidence to enhance upcoming science assessments such as the 7th assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as evidence-based climate policy in general. Finally, we will outline some of the challenges that might be encountered in moving towards the living evidence model.