Overview

The Law and Climate Change Toolkit is an online and open database developed through a partnership between the UN Climate Change secretariat, UN Environment Programme, and the Commonwealth Secretariat working in close collaboration with partner countries, international organizations and research institutions. The Toolkit is designed to provide a global resource to help countries put in place the legal frameworks necessary for effective domestic implementation of the Paris Agreement and their nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The previous version of the Toolkit has recently been updated and improved, and is now hosted here on the UNEP Law and Environment Assistance Platform.

The Toolkit is designed for use by national governments, international organizations in the field of climate law and governance, and experts engaged in assisting countries to implement national climate change laws, as well as academia and research institutions that are undertaking analysis of the growing body of climate change-related legislation throughout the world. 

The Toolkit provides a guided experience for users and offers a variety of functionalities under four interlinked, but independent, main components, supported by comprehensive tagged climate legislation database:

1. Legislation Explorer

Users can search within the full text of climate change-related legislation from around the world, including overarching climate change framework and sectoral legislation. More than 70 climate change framework laws are presented in machine-readable format using the AKN4UN standard, ensuring that this data is accurate and up-to-date, improving tagging, search and retrievability functions, and allowing users to compare versions and track the amendment history.

The legislation can be filtered using guided taxonomies as well as by semantic keyword terms for enhanced search results. The legislation explorer is continuously being expanded to include more laws on climate change, and updated to ensure existing laws reflect their most recent amendments.

2. Legislative Reference Guide

Highlights the key phases of policy action and related areas of activity for legislators to consider in developing climate change framework and sectoral legislation, with example provisions and case-studies from a geographically diverse range of countries.

3. Case-studies

Good practice examples of climate laws from different countries around the world.

4. Glossary

Contains overarching, cross-cutting, and sector-specific climate change related terms and definitions. The glossary section also shows related content auto-tagged to that term.

 

Contributing Partners

We would like to thank the following contributing partners for their support in the preparation of the Toolkit:

Any comments or feedback please contact the Law and Climate Change Toolkit team at unep-law-climatelawtoolkit@un.org.