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Turning a groundswell of climate action into ground rules for net zero

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Following a groundswell of voluntary net-zero targets by companies, regulators are increasingly introducing mandatory rules. If governments can overcome the barriers to rigour, coherence and fairness, such mandatory ‘ground rules’ have the potential to overcome the obstructionism that holds back a just climate transition.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Oxford Martin School for supporting this work. T.H., T.W., S.K.A., M.A., K.A., B.C., S.F., C.H., L.R. and S.S. are part of Oxford Net Zero, which is supported by the University of Oxford’s Strategic Research Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Thomas Hale, Lucilla Dias & Kennedy Mbeva

  2. Oxford Net Zero, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Thomas Hale, Thom Wetzer, Selam Kidane Abebe, Myles Allen, Amir Amel-Zadeh, Kaya Axelsson, Ben Caldecott, Lucilla Dias, Sam Fankhauser, Cameron Hepburn, Lavanya Rajamani & Steve Smith

  3. Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Thom Wetzer, Selam Kidane Abebe, John Armour, Benjamin Franta, Lavanya Rajamani & Rupert Stuart-Smith

  4. Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Thom Wetzer, Ben Caldecott, Sam Fankhauser, Benjamin Franta, Cameron Hepburn & Rupert Stuart-Smith

  5. Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Thom Wetzer, Selam Kidane Abebe, Lucilla Dias, Benjamin Franta & Rupert Stuart-Smith

  6. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Amir Amel-Zadeh

Authors
  1. Thomas Hale
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  2. Thom Wetzer
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  3. Selam Kidane Abebe
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  7. Kaya Axelsson
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  13. Kennedy Mbeva
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  15. Steve Smith
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  16. Rupert Stuart-Smith
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Contributions

The production of this paper was coordinated by T.H. and T.W., who also had overall editorial responsibility. Drafting was led by T.H., T.W., L.D. and R.S.-S. Data gathering and analysis for the table was carried out by L.D. and K.A. All authors contributed to the content, structure and framing of the article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thom Wetzer.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Data collection methodology for Box 1 table.

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Hale, T., Wetzer, T., Abebe, S.K. et al. Turning a groundswell of climate action into ground rules for net zero. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 306–308 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01967-7

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