Harvard Project Director Robert N. Stavins delivered a presentation, "International Climate Policy Architecture for the 2015 Paris Agreement: The Role of Linkage," in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on September 3, 2014. The event, Seoul Climate-Energy Conference: Building the New Climate Regime: What Needs to be Done at the Climate Summit 2014 brought together researchers and business leaders to discuss and prepare for the United Nations Climate Summit on September 23 in New York City.

"The goal now before negotiators is to produce a new international agreement — under the Durban Platform — in Paris in 2015, for implementation in 2020, as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. This presents the greatest opportunity the world has had in 20 years to make meaningful progress on this exceptionally challenging issue. The UN summit in New York can accelerate the momentum toward such a new, path-breaking approach."

"...[C]limate change is essentially unobservable by the public. On a daily basis, we observe the weather, not the climate. This makes it less likely that public opinion will force action the way it did 50 years ago when black smoke rose from industrial smokestacks, and chemicals and raw sewage were dumped untreated into rivers, famously causing one to catch fire."

"...[I]t is anticipated that less coal will be burned than in the absence of the regulation (and more use of natural gas, nuclear and renewable sources of electricity). This means not only less CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, but also decreased emissions of correlated local air pollutants that have direct impacts on human health, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and mercury."

During the last ten years, a number of countries and sub-national jurisdictions have started greenhouse-gas emissions trading systems (ETSs), and a number of others are in planning and preparation. There is increasing interest in linking these systems, both directly and indirectly via connections to emissions-reduction-credit (ERC) systems, the largest of which is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol. This research reviews the evidence of the past decade and finds a number of economic, political, and strategic factors influencing policy decisions about whether or not to link. Because the number of proposed and existing linkages is too small to permit a statistical analysis, we qualitatively identify the determinants of policy decisions involving linkage.

"Because emission control costs vary drastically among the millions of diverse emissions sources, conventional regulations are unfeasible. Only a pricing regime provides incentives for the overall target to be achieved in the least expensive manner. In the long term it is economical because of incentives to adopt lower-cost, cleaner technologies."

Economics are an essential part of understanding climate change and for developing solutions to it. Robert Stavins and Rohini Pande focused on that idea at a Harvard Kennedy School "IDEASpHERE" event titled "Harnessing Market Forces to Protect the Climate."

"...[B]ilateral negotiations between China and the United States — possibly outside of the UNFCCC — are where real progress is most likely to be made. For global efforts to tackle climate change, they are the most significant development since the Kyoto Protocol."

"Given this description of what happened (and did not happen) in Warsaw, is there any cause for optimism regarding the path ahead? There is cause at least for cautious optimism, because of a singular reality — the growing convergence of interests between the two most important countries in the world when it comes to climate change and international policy to address it, namely, China and the United States."

Professor Robert Stavins explains the background of the international climate change policy negotiations now taking place in Warsaw, Poland, their significance, and the path ahead. As director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, he also describes the activities of the Project at the meetings in Warsaw.