International climate negotiations are at an impasse because the world's two largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, the United States and China, are unwilling to accept binding emission-reduction commitments. At the same time, each blames the other for its inaction. This paper proposes a global "deal" for breaking the deadlock in a way that reconciles both countries' economic concerns with the imperative of reducing emissions. The deal has two core elements: (1) All major emitting countries agree to reduce GHG emissions by implementing significant, mutually agreeable, domestic policies and (2) The largest industrialized-country emitters agree to establish a global Carbon Mitigation Fund that would finance the incremental cost of adopting low-carbon technologies in developing countries.

Applying a framework developed in an earlier Harvard Project Discussion Paper¹, Valentina Bosetti and Jeffrey Frankel describe a system of formulas and country-specific emission targets that would stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 460 parts per million (ppm) by 2100. Their approach addresses the most serious deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol: the absence of long-term targets, non-participation by the United States and developing countries, and lack of confidence in countries' willingness to abide by emissions commitments. This plan achieves a more stringent environmental target than the earlier Frankel proposal, which stabilized CO2 at 500 ppm, but also imposes higher costs.

Olmstead and Stavins propose a new architecture following the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol consisting of three essential elements: (1) it provides a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; (2) it would establish an extended time path of targets; and (3) it includes flexible market-based policy instruments to keep costs down and facilitate international equity. The proposed approach is consistent with fundamental aspects of the science, economics, and politics of global climate change. It addresses specific shortcomings of the Kyoto Protocol but also builds on the foundation of the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Both the nature of international climate policy architectures and the development and diffusion of new energy technologies could dramatically influence future costs of reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases. This paper explores the implications of interactions between technology availability and performance and international policy architectures for technology choice and the social cost of limiting atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 500 ppm by the year 2095. Key issues explored in the paper include the role of bioenergy production with CO2 capture and storage (CCS), overshoot concentration pathways, and the sensitivity of mitigation costs to policy and technology.

Despite the dangers of climate change, there is little progress toward a global climate agreement. This paper presents an approach that could reconcile the perspectives of developing and developed countries, differences which have deviled potential agreements for quite some time.

The Kyoto Protocol uses a top-down mechanism to negotiate economy-wide emissions caps. This paper proposes an alternative "sectoral" approach, which would determine industry-level emissions reduction targets based on technological analyses.

Managing the dangers of global climate change will require developing countries to participate in a global climate regime. So far, however, those nations have been nearly universal in their refusal to make commitments to reduce growth in their greenhouse gas emissions. This paper describes how a set of international "Climate Accession Deals" could encourage large policy shifts that are in developing countries' interests and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Many technologies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions do exist, but not in developing countries. Thus, transfer of climate-friendly technologies from developed to developing countries is vital to solve the global climate challenge. This paper proposes an enhanced Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) regime with greater emphasis on technology transfer.

Although an effective solution to the climate change problem will require the cooperation of the developing countries, it is not clear that near-term greenhouse gas emission quotas from these countries are either feasible or desirable. This paper argues that a post-2012 international climate agreement should instead focus on creating incentives to stimulate research and development of new climate-friendly technologies.

This paper proposes a fair and efficient climate change policy architecture for the post-2012 era. It focuses on how to break the current political impasse between the developed and the developing countries. The architecture is a multi-stage framework that gradually engages developing countries.