CPI will be primarily devoted to evaluating, not advocating, the effectiveness of local, national, and global climate policies. Key research questions will be: What effects have climate policies had thus far. And how can we make them more effective. A wide range of policy tools are used to promote climate protection, including regulations, market incentives, and government subsidies—both at the national level and internationally. CPI will ultimately evaluate what is working, what is not and recommend the best way for a nation to move towards a low-carbon growth economy.

CPI's emphasis on the political economy of climate change is a novel approach to understanding the interactions between government policies and financial institutions. In the public sector, it will analyze wasteful and ineffective policy practices and incoherence between fragmented regulators. CPI will also assess gaming and fraud in private sector responses to government climate and energy policies, including such issues as what energy sectors and industries are favored to receive public and private investment, which financial institutions stand to win or lose from new regulations or subsidies for energy projects, and how carbon markets and financial instruments can diversify investment risk.

Finally, CPI will be a global organization, working with local institutions in China, India, Brazil, the United States, and Europe. We will deliver objective, fact-based, comparative analyses across our regions.

CPI is not an advocacy organization. It will build its capacity to influence governments and leading private energy investors upon the analytical credibility, objective independence, and practical relevance of its research on the efficacy of policy implementation in advancing a low-carbon economy. It will publish and widely communicate its research products in the public domain.

CPI co-locates its offices in partnership with prominent national universities, think-tanks and non-profit institutions that have strong partnerships with government agencies. In San Francisco, the CPI offices are located with the ClimateWorks Network, a philanthropic network with advocacy and technical institutions all over the world. Both organizations stand to benefit from existing in the space, with ClimateWorks serving as an advocacy group and CPI providing analytics.

The Berlin-Brandenburg region is a major location for research on climate change and environmental protection. The CPI center joins other cutting-edge research institutes already working in the region, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) and the Department for Energy, Transportation, and the Environment at DIW Berlin. This office will be largely responsible for researching Northern Europe and Russia.

In Venice, CPI will be co-located with Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, an institution established to carry out research in the field of sustainable development. There, Barbara Buchner, an expert on carbon markets, will lead a team of researchers with a focus on Southern Europe, the Maghreb and the Gulf.

In Beijing, CPI is partnering with Tsinghua University, the pre-eminent academic institution in China. There CPI will have access to the world's most populous nation's central government. Additionally, there are plans to establish offices in India and Brazil, 2011.

The Berlin office will focus on researching how upgrading building insulation has the potential to be the greatest source of energy savings. The CPI team will investigate which political instruments can best help to promote insulation upgrading.

Europe has pledged to increase the share of energy it generates from renewable sources to 20% by 2020. The CPI team will investigate whether the steps necessary to achieve this goal are being taken.

The European Emissions Trading System creates incentives for the industrial and financial sector to take the climate impacts of investments into account. The CPI team will study the implementation of emissions trading (auctions, the CDM), particularly with regard to international development and cooperation.