The Effectiveness of New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) in Achieving Carbon Neutrality: A

Relation between carbon neutrality and NEPIs

“The effectiveness of the new environmental policy instruments’ (NEPIs), through market based methods, in lowering the carbon footprint and ensuring carbon neutrality over the past 20 years.”

1. What is the relation between carbon neutrality and NEPIs, examine the concepts of both?

2. How do market regulatory approaches interfere with the impact of NEPIs and critically analyse how to link NEPIs to their impacts?

3. Have NEPIs provided for a significant impact on consumer attitudes in terms of a desire for carbon neutrality within the economic framework for free markets and Neo-liberalism?

4. To what extent has government intervention through the use of either NEPIs, market regulations or a mixture of both increased the production of renewable energy and promoting carbon neutrality?

5. Have NEPIs had an impact on encouraging Research and Development into carbon neutral technologies? If so critically analyse to what extent. 

6. Are NEPIs ultimately efficient enough to build a fully carbon neutral economy that does not rely on fossil fuels? Critically analyse detailed examples of case studies in which NEPIs have been implemented, compare this to regulatory methods. 

The rationale for the dissertation will be to explore and critically analyse a number of legislations introduced by a multitude of state organisations, the EU, UK and others such as Canada, to ensure a decreased carbon footprint and ensuring future carbon neutrality for the sake of environmental sustainability over the past 20 years. These NEPIs or regulatory measures should be used in harmony with market mechanisms to ensure that investment and economic growth are not harmed in the implementation of such instruments. At the same time helping to mitigate the future challenges that the continued rate of climate change will create, economic, environmental and social risks.

The dissertation will detail NEPIs through the policies that entail such instruments, analyse the reasoning behind their implementations, what policy makers’ aspirations of these instruments were and their actual outcomes, this is a very important part of the dissertation. To be able to validly analyse how successful the implementation and result of NEPIs were, through examination of research papers, academic discussions and statistical results, in view of helping to create a carbon neutral future and more regionally lowering carbon footprint in Britain. 

The research aims and purpose of this dissertation is to determine the efficiency of NEPIs in reducing carbon footprint using certain case studies and how this relates to achieving carbon neutrality, the major case studies will be the EU, especially countries like Germany, and the UK, this will be compared to countries such as China, who have only recently accepted the need to tackle climate change and are taking steps in doing this using NEPIs.

An academic analysis will be carried out on various policy legislations that are considered to be NEPIs, an examination of its relations with regulatory measures will be undertaken and their interactions and interferences with each other will be analysed by considering case studies. Examples in the UK will include the 100% Capital Allowances Scheme and the Landfill Tax to analyse how effective and efficient these policy instruments have been in reducing carbon footprint. The analytical study will examine the direct impacts of such instruments, by examining the data and statistics available, these include analysing how the tax incentives for the Allowances scheme given to businesses investing in renewable did indeed increase the level of investment of capital and R&D by these companies in renewable energy, which would help with lowering the UK carbon footprint by making renewable energy more accessible, cheaper and efficient. Another example will be examining the statistics on recycling rates over the past 20 years, whether they have increased and how NEPIs have helped by furthering the agenda of recycling, especially through the use of market mechanisms.

The dissertation will examine the overall data for the level of carbon footprint in the last 20 years and its future predictions and examine what impact NEPIs and/or regulatory measures will have on achieving carbon neutrality within these predictions.

A wide understanding and reading of the extensive literature surrounding NEPIs, policy implementation, its impact on lowering carbon footprint and relationship to carbon neutrality is crucial in being able to complete this dissertation with a sound conclusion and an in depth discussion.

A statistical analyses of data contained within literature will be required to quantitatively examine the success of NEPIs compared to policy makers ambitions and relate this back to the ambitions of the dissertation in understanding its impacts upon lowering carbon footprint and achieving carbon neutrality.