Assessment on global climate treaty
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Assessment on a global climate protocol
Scope
Research question
What is a good global climate agreement such that
- leads to a necessary greenhouse gas emission reductions that stabilise the global temperature change to a societally acceptable level,
- is fair among different countries, industries, and individuals in terms of
- burden of costs of implementation,
- the requirements to reduce emissions,
- the compensation of impacts of climate change,
- includes a funding scheme that produces all the funding required to implement the necessary actions,
- can be implemented effectively even if some countries are unwilling to participate,
- opting-out from the agreement is not beneficial to countries,
- does not cause major adverse side effects in ecology, health, economy, or other sector?
Boundaries
- Spatial: the whole world.
- Temporal: 2009-2100 (agreement is put in force in 2013).
- Sectors: all sectors that are sources or sinks of greenhouse gases.
Definition
Decision variables
- General decisions about the agreement
- The long-term target temperature compared with the pre-industrial temperature (over 2 °C, 2, below 2, 0.8 (current situation), 0 (pre-industrial situation).
- Funding scheme for implementinc costs
- Economic incentives to discourage greenhouse gas emissions
- Implementing carbon trade
- Implementing carbon tax
- Implementing non-fossil fuel GHG taxes (e.g. on methane emissions)
- Economic incentives to encourage carbon sinks
- Distribution of the rights to emit (by person, by country, by previous history) This becomes less important if the global net emissions must be zero, then nobody has a right to emit. But it is true that it affects the amount of compensation from a polluter to a sink owner.
The wish for clarity is expressed by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E). According to Yvo de Boer, the four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are[1]:
- How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
- How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
- How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
- How is that money going to be managed?
- Country-specific decision about participation or not
Other variables
- Greenhouse gas emissions in the world
- Global mean temperature in the world
- Greenhouse gas sinks in the world