With broad recognition that a coordinated global effort is needed to address climate change, negotiations are already underway to define a new international climate agreement. Various architectures for such an agreement have been proposed. This paper undertakes a first-of-its-kind comparison of some prominent options using a common framework to assess four features of these architectures: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and political acceptability, as measured in terms of feasibility and enforceability. The aim is to derive useful policy insights for designing a post-Kyoto agreement.

The outcome of negotiations depends on the bargaining rules. Those hoping for a successful international climate agreement should thus pay attention to the rules governing the negotiation process. This paper describes seven bargaining rules that would facilitate agreement on a post-2012 climate treaty.

Development of effective strategies to address climate change will require collective effort on the part of many countries over an extended period and across a range of activities. The challenge for the international community will be to judge the equity and integrity of the various national commitments.

Because any effective international climate policy will need to be in place for centuries, many unexpected macroeconomic shocks will occur during the policy's existence. This paper explores how such shocks affect global economic conditions under three different international climate policies: a cap-and-trade system, a harmonized carbon tax, and a hybrid policy. The results show that in many respects, carbon tax and hybrid policies are more resilient than a cap-and-trade system.

Policies facilitating innovation and large-scale adoption of low-carbon technologies will need to play a central role in global efforts to address climate change, alongside policies targeted directly at reducing emissions.  This paper considers opportunities for improved and expanded international technology development and transfer strategies within the broader context of international agreements and institutions for climate, energy, trade, development, and intellectual property.

A global effort to mitigate climate change will require cooperation between developed and developing countries. Even as many developed countries are at some stage of enacting significant domestic regulations to meet global stabilization goals, growth in developing country emissions will easily thwart those goals unless a cooperative solution is found. This paper argues that a wide range of options should be pursued to increase developing-country mitigation efforts over time.

Global efforts to address climate change may be on a collision course with global efforts to reduce barriers to trade.  This paper discusses the broad question of whether environmental goals in general are threatened by free trade and the WTO, before turning to the narrower question of whether trade policies likely to be included in various national efforts to address climate change are likely to come into conflict with WTO rules.

Since the Kyoto Protocol has so far failed to achieve the core objective of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, this paper proposes a radically different approach. Rather than attempting to address all sectors and all types of greenhouses gasses under one unified regime, the author argues for a system of linked international agreements that separately address different sectors and gasses, as well as key issues like adaptation and technology R&D, and last-resort remedies like geoengineering.

Forest carbon management must be an important element of any international agreement on climate change.  This paper considers alternative approaches to forest management.  A "national inventory" approach, in which nations receive credits or debits for changes in forest carbon inventories relative to a measured baseline, would reduce global CO2 emissions more effectively than the current Kyoto Protocol system.

This paper proposes a world-wide tax on emissions of greenhouse gases from all sources. The charge would be internationally adjusted from time to time, and each country would collect and keep the revenue it generates.