Lauri Peterson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Researcher at University of Eastern Finland

This paper is a critical review of composite well-being indices that account for inequality. Many well-being indices build upon the idea that while income and wealth are important, they do not constitute a person’s actual quality of life. However, first of all, the analysis finds that while well-being indices aim to go “beyond GDP” and other primar...

Long-standing meteorological research has established that anthropogenic climate change increases the risk and intensity of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, floods, and forest fires. However, comparatively little is known about the impact of such events on policy ambition. Studies on the topic emerged only recently and tend to foc...

Carbon taxation is widely embraced as an effective tool for reducing emissions, yet it is economically regressive, disproportionately affecting economically vulnerable groups. Hence, it is no surprise that carbon taxes often are perceived as unfair, and if implemented without consideration of distributive effects, they risk generating polarization...

Achieving the Paris Agreement’s global temperature goal of keeping warming well below 2 °C and ideally 1.5 °C requires limiting fossil fuel production. In the United Nations climate change negotiations, this need is only beginning to be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as some countries have already adopted supply-side climate policies, initial cooperat...

Carbon taxes are an effective tool to reduce carbon emissions but their use is hampered by a lack of public support. We develop the theoretical argument that social insurance programmes may be designed to mitigate perceptions of economic risk and unfairness, and thereby increase public acceptance of carbon taxes. Employing a novel combination of cr...

We argue in this study that higher electricity expenditures increase voter support for the radical right because these parties oppose costly climate mitigation policies. We use data from Sweden, which experiences extremely high demand for heating energy during winter months. The demand for electricity differs greatly between geographical regions du...

The 2015 Paris Agreement relies on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to outline each country’s policies and plans for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To strengthen global climate action and achieve the Agreement’s temperature goal, it is crucial to enhance the ambition level of NDCs every 5 years. While previous studies have explo...

The continual enhancement of climate commitments is a key aspect of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are an important part of the Paris Agreement’s ratcheting mechanism aiming to ramp up climate change mitigation over time. However, little is still known if individual climate pledges have actually been enhanc...

Climate change is a global crisis that requires countries to act on both domestic and international levels. This paper examines how climate policies in these two arenas are related and to what extent domestic and international climate ambitions are complementary or disparate. While scholarly work has begun to assess the variation in overall climate...

This article analyses the human rights implications of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the CDM is likely to expire in the near future, the experience gained should be used to inform the rules of the new mechanism to be established under the 2015 Paris...