Can Membership in Intergovernmental Organizations Effectively Reduce CO 2 Emissions?

Taocheng Huang and Xiaoyan Li ()
Additional contact information
Taocheng Huang: Montverde Academy Shanghai, Shanghai 201107, China
Xiaoyan Li: School of Economics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 3, 1-17

Abstract: Since the Industrial Revolution, emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO 2 have soared in various countries. Different kinds of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) were established after World War II, which aim for sustainable development. We want to investigate whether membership in IGOs can effectively reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The study uses global panel data of 168 countries from 1960 to 2014 to carry out the fixed effect regression. The results of basic regression show that there is a negative relationship between membership in IGOs and CO 2 emission. The greater the number of IGOs joined by the specific sample country, the lower the CO 2 emissions produced by that country will be. We use social network analysis and find that CO 2 emissions will be effectively reduced if the distance of the sample country from other countries in IGO networks is smaller. In addition, joining more social IGOs can reduce CO 2 emissions more than joining political and economic IGOs. Countries should be encouraged to actively participate in IGOs. IGOs provide a good platform for consultation, communication, and rule-making in environmental governance among countries.

Keywords: international organizations; CO 2 emissions; IGO networks; environment protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/3/1230/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/3/1230/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:3:p:1230-:d:1582910

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().