Reports & Papers

Since the Paris Agreement's adoption in 2015, a majority of the world's largest investors have begun to take action on climate change. According to a new report, the 2016–2017 year showed an average improvement in decarbonization within all major investor categories except pension funds.

As Russian dreams of becoming a ‘great ecological power’ fade, Gazprom, it seems, has been driving climate policy all along.

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."

The outcome of the December 2011 United Nations climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, provides an important new opportunity to move toward an international climate policy architecture that is capable of delivering broad international participation and significant global CO2 emissions reductions at reasonable cost. This paper addresses an important component of potential climate policy architecture for the post-Durban era: links among independent tradable permit systems for greenhouse gases.

In the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was set up by Article 12 to achieve two-fold objectives: to help Annex I countries to meet their emission targets in a cost-effective way and to support non-Annex I countries in achieving the goal of sustainable development. Although technology transfer is not a requirement for CDM, experience shows that CDM may contribute significantly to technology transfer. However, it is difficult to induce large-scale technology transfer through CDM in its present form. The project-specific nature of CDM leads to high transaction costs and makes it difficult to create economies of scale and pool risks across projects of the same type. Thus CDM is not effective in attracting more low-carbon investors. The CDM does not address the competitiveness concerns of the private sector in developed countries.This paper addresses these challenging issues by proposing an enhanced CDM regime with greater emphasis on technology transfer from developed countries to developing countries.

"...[T]his paper provides a new multi-stage climate policy framework based on a revised Global Development Right (GDR) calculation, and proposes a feasible hybrid negotiation framework from the perspective of developing countries. According to the "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities" principle in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), we recognize that due to the historical emissions contributions and different pace of industrialization and growth around the world, a successful international climate policy needs to balance equity and efficiency and eventually achieve an overall carbon mitigation target."

This paper offers a detailed plan to set quantitative national limits on emissions of greenhouse gases, building on the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol. It attempts to fill in the most serious gaps: the absence of targets extending as far as 2100, the absence of participation by the United States and developing countries, and the absence of reason to think that countries will abide by commitments. The plan elaborates on the idea of a framework of formulas that can assign quantitative limits across countries, one budget period at a time. Unlike other proposals for century-long paths of emission targets that are based purely on science (concentration goals) or economics (cost-benefit optimization), this plan is based partly on politics.

The Bali climate change conference was a qualified success. Before we went to Bali, we observed that it will be good news if there’s no bad news coming out of the negotiations.  This was achieved, and then some.