Finding the most promising climate change policies to work on
How can you identify high-impact, underrated policy opportunities before they become obvious?
For policy advocacy organisations, focusing on the right policies can easily make a 100-fold difference in how much impact they achieve. But how can climate nonprofits identify the most promising topics to work on? This month’s newsletters features a guest article by Carl Frederick Luthin and Vegard Beyer about how climate think tank Future Matters identifies topics to work on.
Before you dive in, here are some promising opportunities and writing that might interest you:
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How Future Matters identifies climate policy priorities
In 1991, researchers asked participants how much they were willing to pay to prevent migrating birds from drowning in oil ponds. One group was told two thousand birds were at risk; another, 20,000; a third, 200,000. The answers came back: $80, $78, and $88. A hundred-fold difference in scope had almost no effect on how people responded.
Policy advocates make equivalent mistakes every day – just with much higher stakes. When deciding which policy to pursue, experienced advocates tend to anchor on what is trending in the news, what their peers are working on, or what their organisation has historically done. While you can hardly work 100x as hard or as effectively, your choice of policy objectives can very well make a 100-fold difference in how much impact you achieve.
How can you identify high-impact, underrated policy opportunities before they become obvious? Future Matters, a Berlin-based climate policy think tank, developed a method that draws on the importance-tractability-neglectedness framework and adapts it to the specific challenges of climate policy advocacy.
Why instinct fails
Three cognitive biases regularly distort advocacy priorities.
Scope insensitivity. As the bird study illustrates, our intuitions about scale are poor. We struggle to feel the difference between a policy that could prevent 50 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions and one that could prevent 500 million tonnes. Both feel like “big wins” – the numbers are too large to carry emotional weight. Only deliberate analysis can surface the difference.
Availability and recency bias. We overweight what is in the news and what colleagues are currently discussing. A piece of legislation attracting media coverage will draw advocates even when less-covered opportunities have far higher potential impact.
Groupthink on neglectedness. The more advocates are already working on a problem, the more it can seem like the right problem to work on. But a policy that twenty well-resourced organisations are already pushing hard on likely has less room for additional contribution.
These are well-known properties of how human minds process information under uncertainty. A systematic method is more reliable than intuition for decisions of this complexity.
Core criteria for policy prioritisation
If you already think in terms of importance, tractability, and neglectedness, the adaptation to policy advocacy involves a few important modifications. To evaluate which policy deserves your attention, assess it against five criteria – separately.
Impact potential. How much could this policy advance your goals globally, over the long term? The relevant question is not “is this good?” but “how much good could this realistically do?” A clean energy transition partnership between major economies may prevent hundreds of megatons of emissions; a domestic efficiency programme in a mid-sized country, perhaps a few.
Effort. What would it take to get this policy adopted? Account for the full scope of work – research, policy development, coalition-building, advocacy – from initial idea to successful adoption. Some policies are already well-researched and just need a champion to carry them into a few specific fora. Others require years of groundwork before advocacy can begin.
Feasibility. Given current political, economic, and social conditions, how likely is a serious push for this measure to succeed? Consider political opposition, windows of opportunity, institutional capacity, and whether conditions are ripe for change. A proposal with high impact potential is worthless if it has no path to adoption in a relevant timeframe. In practice, it helps to model feasibility separately at different stages of the policy process – proposal, committee, adoption, implementation – since the bottlenecks can be very different at each stage.
Neglectedness. How many other advocates are already working on this? The concept of counterfactual impact is essential here. If a policy is already being pushed effectively by well-resourced organisations, your additional effort substitutes for work that would happen anyway. An opportunity where your team could genuinely make the difference between success and failure is worth far more.
Fit with your skills. Do you have the specific expertise, political relationships, or institutional credibility this policy requires? Your comparative advantage is where you can contribute something others cannot easily replicate.
Evaluating policies on each of these criteria separately is what makes the method work. A policy requiring considerable effort may still be worthwhile if its impact is proportionally larger and few others are attempting it. A seemingly high-impact policy becomes much less attractive if it is already crowded with well-resourced advocates.
One important consideration alongside the positive criteria: complex policy systems can generate harms that are hard to foresee. Systematically consider how your proposed policy might be misused or create harmful side effects – especially when working on dual-use technologies or biosecurity.
A systematic process for comparison
Ranking multiple policy options across five dimensions simultaneously is precisely what human intuition handles badly. The following process structures the comparison so that the hard parts – scale differences and trade-offs between criteria – become visible.
Generate and eliminate. Brainstorm the policy options that could plausibly have high long-term impact on your goals. Conduct initial research on each, then eliminate obvious non-starters: negligible impact, insurmountable barriers, or already being pursued by virtually every major organisation in your field.
Rank under each criterion separately. For each criterion in turn, rank all remaining options from best to worst. Start by identifying which policy performs best and which performs worst, then arrange the others in between.
Score to capture relative differences. Rankings tell you which option is better, but not by how much – and the difference between “twice as good” and “ten times better” drives very different decisions. Give the top-ranked option under each criterion a score of 100, then rate all others relative to that anchor. This forces you to quantify differences your intuition would otherwise flatten.
Compare overall priority. The essential logic is multiplicative: impact, feasibility, neglectedness, and fit reinforce each other, while high effort reduces priority. Plotting each option with effort on one axis and combined impact on the other makes trade-offs visible at a glance.
The method in practice: EU-India green steel
In 2023, Future Matters applied this method to identify EU climate policy priorities for the incoming 2024–2029 mandate. One of those eight was an EU-India partnership on low-carbon steel production. India’s steel industry has the potential to lock in up to 125 Gt CO₂e of cumulative emissions by 2100 if it follows a conventional development pathway. Most European advocates were focused on India’s energy transition and coal exit; industrial decarbonisation was comparatively neglected. And 2025 offered a clear political window with the planned revision of the EU-India strategic partnership.
In January 2026, the EU and India agreed at their summit in New Delhi to cooperate on industrial decarbonisation in heavy industries, with green steel as a focus. Future Matters was one of several actors contributing to this outcome. What the method provided was an early signal that this opportunity was underweighted by most actors – and the confidence to commit resources before the policy window opened.
Carl Frederick Luthin is a Policy Manager in Climate Protection at Future Matters. Vegard Beyer is co-founder and Director of Partnerships & Communications at Future Matters. You can read the full method and case study in Future Matters’ original article, or explore the underlying research in 8 EU Policy Priorities for Global Decarbonisation.
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