Climate Change


61 - 90 of 186
09 June 2008

The Action Plan agreed in Bali in December 2007 provided a structure, timelines, building blocks and key words to accelerate the negotiations on a future climate change regime. Despite this progress, however, positions between the different parties remain far apart. With the aim of developing analytical tools, increasing understanding and framing the key trade-offs in order to start narrowing this gap, the European Climate Platform (ECP) held a small high-level meeting in Madrid on 17 & 18 April 2008.

05 June 2008

Under the chairmanship of Gunnar Still, Senior Vice President and Head of Environment Division at ThyssenKrupp, CEPS organized a Task Force to explore possible initiatives within the context of the G8+5 dialogue on tackling climate change. This report identifies a number of concrete measures that could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while at the same time stimulating structural change and technology development and diffusion.

04 June 2008

This is the 3rd study to be published in the CEPS Policy Brief series from ongoing research being carried out for the EU-funded ADAM project (ADaptation And Mitigation strategies: supporting European climate policy). Following an introduction to the aims and objectives of the ADAM project, section 2 sets out the rationales for public policy related to adaptation to the impacts of climatic change in the EU.

16 May 2008

The structure of some industrial sectors is so highly concentrated that just a handful of companies are responsible for producing a significant share of that sector’s total greenhouse gases emissions worldwide. These sectors are thus a ‘natural’ focus of policy-makers concerned with climate change and have attracted keen interest from the EU.

17 April 2008

Defying all odds, governments participating in the global climate negotiations at Bali, Indonesia reached agreement on a roadmap towards a global climate change agreement to be completed by the end of 2009, ready to fill the gap when the commitments under the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012. The contributions in this book examine some of the most difficult and controversial questions that global climate change negotiators face between now and the emergence of a ‘Copenhagen Protocol’ in 2009, and even beyond.

28 February 2008

The EU emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS) introduced in 2005 is the only mandatory cap-and-trade system operating in the world today. Lessons could be taken from the EU stance which allows for flexibility in rules and realises emission reductions with firm commitments by stakeholders.
This CEPS Policy Brief is published in a bilingual English-Japanese version. The Japanese version was originally published in Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 14 February 2008.

01 February 2008

This paper is based on ongoing research being carried out in the context of the ADAM project (ADaptation And Mitigation strategies: supporting European climate policy), funded by the European Commission. While initial responses to the challenges of climate change concentrated on mitigation, in particular reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in an attempt to curb the growth in global temperatures, there is now increasing recognition of the need for nations, communities and individuals, to adapt to some level of climate change, even with reductions in emissions.

01 February 2008

The impacts of climate change can be analysed with the same economic assessment tools used for analysing the impacts of changing economic conditions. The fundamental concept is that impacts of climate change will affect the behaviour of economic agents, who will adapt autonomously, but autonomous adaptation is not always the optimal solution. The paper explains that by analysing the behaviour of people as a consequence of climate change, the resulting scenarios can help policy-makers in designing policies where autonomous adaptation does not reflect a social optimum.

23 January 2008

In anticipation of the European Commission’s publication of its long-awaited proposal for implementing the European Council’s 2007 decisions on the integrated climate and energy policy, CEPS Senior Fellow Christian Egenhofer investigates the justification for continuing free allocation of allowances to industry.

21 December 2007

The new international climate change agenda encompasses trade, argues a new CEPS Commentary by Christian Egenhofer that assesses the results of the UN climate change negotiations concluded in Bali on 15 December. The first-ever meeting among trade ministers on climate change is another sign of an emerging trade and climate change agenda.

04 December 2007

This report analyses the very broad issue of technology development, demonstration and diffusion with a view to identifying the key elements of a complementary global technology track in the post-2012 framework. It identifies a number of immediate and concrete steps that can be taken to provide content and a structure for such a track.

04 December 2007

Successful global sectoral industry approaches could become an effective means of broadening the range of contributions by all parties to greenhouse gas reductions, and of addressing competitiveness concerns in trade-exposed industries. This report puts these two hypotheses to the test and identifies the key requirements for global sectoral industry approaches to work.

05 November 2007

There has been a growing interest in the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a multilateral initiative of six founding partner countries in the region – Australia, China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea and the US – for addressing air pollution, energy security and climate protection in a way that facilitates development and poverty eradication. Canada became the 7th member in October 2007. This paper presents an overview of the Asia Pacific Partnership, beginning with a literature review.

06 June 2007

The difficulty of achieving and implementing a global climate change agreement has stimulated a wide range of policy proposals designed to favour the participation of a large number of countries in a global cooperative effort to control greenhouse gas emissions.

06 March 2007

Having been underway for more than two years, the review of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is entering a decisive phase with the European Commission’s recent announcement that it will table formal proposals in the second half of 2007.

09 November 2006

This report examines the challenge of adequately addressing adaptation to climate change impacts in developing counties by means of international collaboration, and the reasons why it is in the interest of industrialised countries, including the EU, to do so. This is a topic that has been gaining prominence on the agenda of the international climate change negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as well as in other international forums.

09 November 2006

Climate change is a serious and long-term challenge with potentially irreversible consequences. The current design of both national and international climate change policies, however, tends to rest on a narrow application of social cost-benefit analysis, with an emphasis on short-term efficiency of resource allocation. In a departure from the conventional approach, this exploratory study sets out to integrate, from a societal perspective, the long-term impact of climate policy measures into the cost-benefit calculations of GHG emissions reduction strategies.

19 July 2006

This report contains an analysis on the review of the EU Emissions Trading scheme from a strategic and an operational perspective. It covers the implementation of the EU ETS undertaken to date, its linkages with investment decisions, the 2006 review and impacts on global carbon markets. The executive summary contains a number of concrete and operational policy recommendations for improving the EU ETS. The recommendations are primarily addressed to EU policy-makers but some of them may also be relevant to other key players influencing the functioning of the EU ETS.

01 December 2005

This report presents the findings of a multi-stakeholder CEPS Task Force, co-chaired by David Hone, Shell and Lasse Nord, Norsk Hydro. After taking stock of the EU ETS, the report examines the need and potential for short-term adaptation of the second round of allocation and makes concrete and operational recommendations to EU member states and the European Commission.

01 December 2005

This report is based on a background study and seminar on the functioning of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) organised under the auspices of European Climate Platform (ECP), which is a joint initiative of Clipore and CEPS. It contains an analysis of the CDM from strategic and operational perspectives, and addresses the question of how the CDM could be improved in order to transform it from a limited instrument to a major tool to achieve long-term climate change objectives.

01 November 2005

The EU and the US have found themselves supporting two polar views on which strategy is the most effective in achieving stabilisation of greenhouse (GHG) emissions: ‘market pull’ vs ‘technology push’. As an advocate of the latter, the US asserts that the principal emphasis should be on technology development, financed through typical public R&D programmes. In supporting the ‘market-pull’ approach, the EU argues that technological change is an incremental process emanating primarily from business and industry, induced by government incentives.

01 November 2005

Within the United States, the locations of carbon-intensive industries have important implications for climate policy. This paper examines the state-level and regional patterns in the distributions of key industries – coal, oil & gas and autos – and their implications for US climate policy-making. It concludes that the coal industry has a disproportionate impact on climate policy because of the distorting effect of the role of a few key coal states in national elections.

01 July 2005

In this new Policy Brief, US Congressional and Presidential actions on several recent budgets are examined for the four principal areas of the budget affecting climate change: technology, science, international and tax credits, with a special emphasis on energy technology. The author finds several major differences in Presidential and Congressional approaches to funding climate change programmes, providing further evidence that the Presidential-Congressional divide on climate policy is continuing to widen.

01 May 2005

Recognising that climate change poses one of the world’s greatest challenges, this new CEPS Task Force report identifies priority areas for coherent EU domestic policies in the short, medium and long term. It gives a first indication of what would be implied in concrete terms for the EU to meet its target of limiting the future global average temperature increase to 2°C above its pre-industrial level.

01 March 2005

This book analyses the policy mixes that provide the best incentives for firms and governments to act on climate change and sign up to international climate agreements. In doing so, the authors address a multitude of related issues including the linkages between flexible mechanisms and voluntary agreements; regulation and taxation; the opportunities and barriers of the Kyoto Protocol for industry.

01 February 2005

This Policy Brief elaborates on the impact of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty on the preparation, formulation and adoption of the EU’s position in international climate change negotiations. The analysis focuses on how changes envisaged will affect the policy-making process and particularly on whether shortcomings identified in the current situation will be addressed.