Climate Policies in the BRICS Countries: The Interrelation between GHG Emissions Reduction and Socio-Economic Development

This chapter depicts BRICS countries’ climate policies in three dimensions. First, it summarises key aims, priorities, and directions of national and global GHG emission reduction policies. Second, it features the main institutions and instruments underlying these policies and presents the mechanisms through which primary interest groups’ preferences are formed, coordinated, and incorporated into decision-making. Third, based on the Climate Action Tracker assessments and the analysis of the emissions-growth decoupling effect, it provides an evaluation of the efficiency of climate policy in each country and the prospects of its development. Such three-dimensional analysis helps determine the factors that play a role in the formulation of climate policies, defining their ambitions and design in China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and India - countries with divergent characteristics of social and economic development. This chapter concludes that the countries’ readiness to embark on low-carbon development and the coordination level of influence groups’ interests in emission reduction measures is largely determined by their ability to devise such institutional design of a climate policy that allows not only achieving climate targets but also attaining some of the crucial aims and objectives of countries’ social and economic developments.