A common ontology to record and structure climate and energy policy data.
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The Climate and Energy Policy Ontology (CEPO) is a common set of definitions and relationships which can be used to structure information about climate and energy policy instruments. The CEPO was first developed in 2025 and will be extended and revised according to the needs of the user community.
The CEPO is a collaborative effort between different researchers, from academia and civil society, to map and clearly define different kinds of climate and energy policy instruments. Existing ways of categorizing policy instruments in the climate and energy realm were developed by practitioners like the International Energy Agency (IEA), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Climate Policy Database (CPDB) and Climate Policy Radar (CPR). These actors gather data on which policy documents have been published in certain years and tag them with potential instruments. However, their focus is mapping climate policies and their existence on a large scale, not on the specific instruments and how they relate to each other. In some cases, the methodology and definitions were not made publicly available.
We therefore propose a climate and energy policy ontology which encompasses instruments at a sufficient level of detail to code in-depth policy data. Rather than coding all “tax instruments” together, we differentiate between a tax reduction, tax deduction, tax credit, tax exemption, and tax rebate (all of which are types of tax incentives). This level of granularity is important in being able to compare policies across jurisdictions and time. In order to ensure interoperability with other ontologies it makes use of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and its principles. It also maps its alignment with the CPDB and CPR policy instrument typologies.
The ontology can be used to code policy documents with information about the instruments that they contain. Such policy data can be used to answer questions such as:
- Which countries tend to use the most regulatory instruments vs economic instruments to introduce electric vehicles?
- What are the most common types of tax incentives to promote renewable energy, and how have these changed over time?
- Which policy instruments (or mixes of policy instruments) have been the most effective at promoting decarbonization outcomes (emissions reductions, growth in clean energy generation, etc.)?
docs folder of the repository.Contributors: