J-PAL North America Climate Action Learning Lab

Over the past three years, the United States has already allocated an unprecedented level of funding through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to promote policies that will accelerate the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy. Beginning in 2025, we expect even greater participation and leadership by state and local jurisdictions as they enact programs to promote decarbonization in areas ranging from transportation and land use, to building and facilities energy, to forests and agriculture.

Policies and regulations can drive changes in energy use, emissions reduction, and climate resilience. But to ensure these policies effectively increase decarbonization and combat climate change, it’s essential that they are grounded in solid evidence. State and local governments have the unique opportunity over the next few years to contribute to this evidence base and build understanding of what works in the battle against climate change. Research is key in this context, as there are still many unknowns about what works in decarbonization. Members of J-PAL's research network recently published an article in Nature that further describes this opportunity.

Randomized evaluations, also called randomized controlled trials (RCTs), are one type of impact evaluation method. J-PAL focuses on randomized evaluations due to their unique ability to measure impact in policy research. In a randomized evaluation, study participants are randomly assigned to one or more groups that receive (different types of) an intervention, known as the treatment group(s), and a comparison group that does not receive the intervention (or receives care as usual). Researchers then measure the outcomes of interest in the treatment and comparison groups. Randomized evaluations make it possible to obtain a rigorous estimate of the causal impact of an intervention. In other words, they tell us whether certain changes in participants’ lives can be attributed to the program. Please note that you do not need to have experience with this evaluation design in order to participate in the Climate Action Learning Lab. If you are interested in learning more about randomized evaluations, you can review J-PAL’s research resources

The Learning Lab application will be live from January 30 - March 31, 2025.

State and local jurisdictions committed to advancing effective solutions to climate mitigation. We are seeking leaders who are motivated to harness data and evaluation to understand program impacts and identify the most effective solutions to scale. In particular, we are targeting:

• Jurisdictions launching a Climate Action Plan or a broader set of programs in the coming six months to two  years and wish to develop a learning agenda and assess the evaluation readiness of their projects.
• Grant recipients who have a climate mitigation program that will launch in the coming six months to two years and are interested in building out an evaluation to inform their new program.
• Jurisdictions planning to apply for grant funding for climate mitigation strategies who would like to build an evaluation into their proposal to strengthen it.

Jurisdictions are encouraged to include at least two, and up to five, staff members from transportation, climate, energy, or related agencies to participate in Climate Action Learning Lab virtual programming. Two staff members per jurisdiction will be sponsored to travel and participate in the in-person summit in Cambridge, MA in July 2025 (pending completion of CALL curriculum). 

J-PAL North America strongly encourages program directors, managers, and implementers, along with data/evaluation team members, to be prioritized for participation.

Behavior change plays a critical role in reducing emissions. Under the IRA, for example, $284 billion has been allocated to decarbonization programming, and nearly two thirds of this funding involves projections about policy-driven behavior changes, such as rebates that encourage homeowners to improve their home’s energy efficiency. However, there is still much unknown about how to structure and target decarbonization programs to bring about the intended behavior change (e.g., how to structure and target rebates so people take them up). It is critical to evaluate these programs to guide further investments in strategies that are effective. 

Example policy questions include: 

• How do different densities of nearby electric vehicle charging stations affect people’s decisions to switch to electric vehicles?
• Do contractor education campaigns have any effect on increasing adoption of heat pump water heaters?
• What levels of subsidies lead to more low-income households adopting green technologies?