TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sprinz, Detlef F.
A1  - de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno
A1  - Kallbekken, Steffen
A1  - Stokman, Frans
A1  - Saelen, Hakon
A1  - Thomson, Robert
T1  - Predicting Paris: Multi-Method Approaches to Forecast the Outcomes of Global Climate Negotiations
JF  - Politics and Governance
N2  - We examine the negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris, December 2015. Prior to these negotiations, there was considerable uncertainty about whether an agreement would be reached, particularly given that the world’s leaders failed to do so in the 2009 negotiations held in Copenhagen. Amid this uncertainty, we applied three different methods to predict the outcomes: an expert survey and two negotiation simulation models, namely the Exchange Model and the Predictioneer’s Game. After the event, these predictions were assessed against the coded texts that were agreed in Paris. The evidence suggests that combining experts’ predictions to reach a collective expert prediction makes for significantly more accurate predictions than individual experts’ predictions. The differences in the performance between the two different negotiation simulation models were not statistically significant.
KW  - climate policy
KW  - climate regime
KW  - expert survey
KW  - forecasting
KW  - global negotiations
KW  - Paris agreement
KW  - prediction
KW  - simulation
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v4i3.654
SN  - 2183-2463
VL  - 4
SP  - 172
EP  - 187
PB  - Cogitatio Press
CY  - Lisbon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sælen, Håkon
A1  - Hovi, Jon
A1  - Sprinz, Detlef F.
A1  - Underdal, Arild
T1  - How US withdrawal might influence cooperation under the Paris climate agreement
JF  - Environmental science & policy
N2  - Using a novel agent-based model, we study how US withdrawal might influence the political process established by the Paris Agreement, and hence the prospects for reaching the collective goal to limit warming below 2 degrees C. Our model enables us to analyze to what extent reaching this goal despite US withdrawal would place more stringent requirements on other core elements of the Paris cooperation process. We find, first, that the effect of a US withdrawal depends critically on the extent to which member countries reciprocate others' promises and contributions. Second, while the 2 degrees C goal will likely be reached only under a very small set of conditions in any event, even temporary US withdrawal will further narrow this set significantly. Reaching this goal will then require other countries to step up their ambition at the first opportunity and to comply nearly 100% with their pledges, while maintaining high confidence in the Paris Agreements institutions. Third, although a US withdrawal will first primarily affect the United States' own emissions, it will eventually prove even more detrimental to other countries' emissions.
KW  - climate change
KW  - Paris agreement
KW  - President Trump
KW  - 2 degrees C target
KW  - agent-based modeling
KW  - reciprocity
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.03.011
SN  - 1462-9011
SN  - 1873-6416
VL  - 108
SP  - 121
EP  - 132
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -