Understanding Climate Legislation Decisions with Machine Learning

Effective action is crucial in order to avert climate disaster. Key in enacting change is the swift adoption of climate positive legislation which advocates for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This is because government legislation can result in far-reaching impact, due to the relationships between climate policy, technology, and market forces. To advocate for legislation, current strategies aim to identify potential levers and obstacles, presenting an opportunity for the application of recent advances in machine learning language models. Here we propose a machine learning pipeline to analyse climate legislation, aiming to investigate the feasibility of natural language processing for the classification of climate legislation texts, to predict policy voting outcomes. By providing a model of the decision making process, the proposed pipeline can enhance transparency and aid policy advocates and decision makers in understanding legislative decisions, thereby providing a tool to monitor and understand legislative decisions towards climate positive impact.