Abstract

The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate governance that outline what each
country intends to do to combat climate change. Often, these documents contain headline
greenhouse gas percentage reduction targets that appear to summarize countries’ contri-
butions to mitigation. This is a boon for comparative climate policy research. However, I
show in this paper that the Paris pledges require detailed interpretation to be comparable.
I demonstrate the risks in comparing these targets by re-visiting a recent studying linking
national public opinion to the stringency of countries’ mitigation goals. I develop new indi-
cators that better account for the structure of the targets and show in replications that the
original finding is inconsistent with the underlying data. I conclude by drawing lessons for
studying the Paris pledges.