# Identifying Climate Targets in National Laws and Policies using Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02822/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [ClimateBert: A Pretrained Language Model for Climate-Related Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12010/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Sustainability Reports Using Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08073/) (2020)
- [ClimateBERT-NetZero: Detecting and Assessing Net Zero and Reduction Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08096/) (2023)
- [Towards Answering Climate Questionnaires from Unstructured Climate Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04253/) (2023)
- [Climate change sentiment on Twitter: An unsolicited public opinion poll](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03804/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantified policy targets are a fundamental element of climate policy, typically characterised by domain-specific and technical language. Current methods for curating comprehensive views of global climate policy targets entail significant manual effort. At present there are few scalable methods for extracting climate targets from national laws or policies, which limits policymakers' and researchers' ability to (1) assess private and public sector alignment with global goals and (2) inform policy decisions. In this paper we present an approach for extracting mentions of climate targets from national laws and policies. We create an expert-annotated dataset identifying three categories of target ('Net Zero', 'Reduction' and 'Other' (e.g. renewable energy targets)) and train a classifier to reliably identify them in text. We investigate bias and equity impacts related to our model and identify specific years and country names as problematic features. Finally, we investigate the characteristics of the dataset produced by running this classifier on the Climate Policy Radar (CPR) dataset of global national climate laws and policies and UNFCCC submissions, highlighting the potential of automated and scalable data collection for existing climate policy databases and supporting further research. Our work represents a significant upgrade in the accessibility of these key climate policy elements for policymakers and researchers. We publish our model at https://huggingface.co/ClimatePolicyRadar/national-climate-targets and related dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ClimatePolicyRadar/national-climate-targets.