BeKlimBu

In recent years, several German federal states have set themselves specific climate protection targets – in some cases in the form of climate protection laws – which stipulate a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and, in many cases, climate neutrality by 2045 or even earlier. However, these climate protection targets can only be successfully implemented if the respective federal states continuously review the progress and, in particular, the effectiveness of their own climate protection measures. Such a regular review makes it possible to adapt existing measures and adopt new measures, if necessary, in order to ensure that the targets are achieved.

However, experience from recent years shows that the impact of climate protection measures can hardly be robustly quantified, particularly at the level of the federal states. One reason for this is their "sandwich position", which leads to complex and sometimes unclear interactions between the federal states’ own climate policy measures and those of the federal government and the EU on the one hand and the municipalities on the other. The impact of most climate policy measures therefore cannot be clearly assigned to the different levels. 

The question therefore arises as to how the implementation of the federal states’ climate protection targets can still be supported, how their accuracy can be increased and how the costs can be kept in check.

The possibilities and limitations of collecting and centrally recording climate protection measures at federal state level in a targeted manner, as well as evaluating them with external expertise, are to be examined in more detail in this project. The experiences of the Council of Experts on Climate Change of the federal government and the Expert Council for Climate Protection of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg will also be taken into account. A structuring of the state's climate protection policy into fields of action and transformation paths is assumed as a hypothesis. The research project aims to answer the following two main research questions: 

• How can the evaluation of federal states’ policy climate protection measures (e.g. by an independent expert council) be made possible on the basis of transformation pathways developed by the federal state governments for key fields of climate protection action?
• What could a system for presenting climate protection measures look like that provides an expert council with sufficient, comprehensible and clear information and enables it to carry out an independent expert assessment?

The research project uses the example of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia to develop exemplary fields of action and transformation paths. The aim is to create initial approaches and foundations for the above-mentioned structuring of the federal states’ climate protection policies into fields of action and transformation paths.