Deliberate decline as a decarbonization strategy under the Paris Agreement

Achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets requires rapid transformations of the technologies and practices contributing to climate change. In addition to accelerating the development and diffusion of clean technologies, achieving such transformations requires policies to catalyse the decline of carbon-intensive technologies, materials, energies and industrial processes (Meadowcroft and Rosenbloom, 2023; Rosenbloom and Rinscheid, 2020). Such policies include phase-outs (Trencher et al., 2023; Trencher et al., 2022), bans (Meckling and Nahm, 2019) and restrictions or governance instruments that force or induce the downscaling of problematic artefacts, socio-technical systems and activities. Such policies that pursue ‘deliberate decline’ (Rosenbloom and Rinscheid, 2020) are attracting increasing attention. However, the extant literature focuses on single case studies or single industries like coal (Diluiso et al., 2021) and automobiles (Meckling and Nahm, 2019). Meanwhile, systematic analyses of the different kinds of decline actions implemented by different countries and across different sectors such as energy, buildings, transport, agriculture, etc. are lacking. As the flagship description of a country’s mitigation actions, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and associated reports submitted to the UNFCCC offer a rich resource to study decline activity. These documents have been subject to analysis in the literature, with scholars examining variation in decarbonization ambition (Tørstad et al., 2020), adherence to particular principles (e.g. fairness) (Biesbroek et al., 2022; Stephenson et al., 2019) and actions in specific sectors, like agriculture (Hönle et al., 2019). However, UNFCCC documents are yet to be explicitly studied from the perspective of deliberate decline. One exception, Janzwood and Harrison (2023), studied supply-side policies of fossil-fuel producing states. But it remains unclear to what extent decline measures are used by different countries to pursue decarbonisation. Accordingly, we systematically examine the NDC and related reports of the ten highest-emitting Annex-1 countries to answer: 1. What kinds of deliberate decline policies are discussed? 2. What sectors and technologies, substances and processes do these target? 3. What policies are described and how do these differ in terms of ‘decline intensity’? To identify quantitative and qualitative trends across countries, we build a first-of-its-kind dataset, systematically coding the contents of each country’s latest NDC and Biennial Report. Two contributions are made. First, we provide the first empirical exploration of different kinds of decline strategies, systematically showing how different strategies are associated with different targets and contexts. The analysis covers decline strategies driven by substitution (e.g. plastic with biomaterials, coal with gas or renewables), downscaling (e.g. the production and use of ozone-depleting substances) and cessation (e.g. bans on deforestation or peat extraction). Second, we develop a novel index to measure the ‘intensity’ of differing decline policies, furthering the climate policy literature (Schaffrin et al., 2015). This enables us to not only conceptualise and measure key characteristics defining the process of deliberate decline, but also to identify countries and targets (technologies, substances, processes) most frequently associated with decline policies. These two contributions advance our conceptual and empirical understanding of decline as a key paradigm for pursuing decarbonization and innovation.