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- Coria, Jessica, 1979, et al.
(author)
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The progress of GHG markets : opportunities and risks
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The climate negotiations at the COP15 in December 2009 did not produce a new international treaty with binding emissions commitments but the Copenhagen Accord for dealing with post-2012 climate change. Given the current climate negotiation process it is unlikely that we will see a global climate agreement soon on a global cap between all Convention members participating in a single carbon market. We may be more likely to see a stepwise process moving towards this scenario, most likely involving linkages between different national policy programs when it comes to mitigation as well as offsetting emissions. In such a process countries will offer commitments based on their domestic abilities, preferences and policies, norms and institutions. National and sub-national policies are thus likely to be the de-facto building blocks of nations' abilities to make and fulfill international commitments. However, also with multilateral mitigation programs without binding commitments, carbon markets will be needed as well as international authorities that support measurement, reporting and verification rules and the international registries. Such markets will necessarily be complicated and temporary in a world without an overarching binding agreement. There will be numerous tradeoffs between different kinds of second-best arrangements. The purpose of this report is to build knowledge about the effects of the development of regional and international carbon markets and the auxiliary technology agreements that might be needed. Among the topics we address are: the evolution and integration of carbon markets, the impacts of policy and technology cost uncertainty on the cost of meeting targets through a carbon market mechanism, the effect of banking, price floors and ceilings, institutional constraints and technological change in the further development of carbon markets and their links to other environmental policy instruments, and the potential of REDD-plus to encourage sustainable forest development and climate mitigation.
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- Carlsson, Fredrik, 1968, et al.
(author)
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A Fair Share : Burden-Sharing Preferences in the United States and China
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Using a choice experiment, we investigated preferences for distributing the economic burden of decreasing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China. We asked respondents about their preferences for four burden-sharing rules to reduce CO2 emissions according to their country’s 1) historical emissions, 2) income level, 3) equal right to emit per person, and 4) current emissions. We found that U.S. respondents preferred the rule based on current emissions, while the equal right to emit rule was clearly least preferred. The Chinese respondents, on the other hand, preferred the historical rule, while the current emissions rule was the least preferred. Respondents overall favored the rule that was least costly for their country. These marked differences may explain the difficulties countries face in agreeing how to share costs, presenting a tough hurdle to overcome in future negotiations. We also found that the strength of the preferences was much stronger in China, suggesting that how mitigation costs are shared across countries is more important there.
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- Carlsson, Fredrik, 1968, et al.
(author)
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Is Fairness Blind? - The effect of framing on preferences for effort-sharing rules
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- By using a choice experiment, this paper focuses on citizens’ preferences for effort-sharing rules of how carbon abatement should be shared among countries. We find that Swedes do not rank the rule favoring their own country highest. Instead, they prefer the rule where all countries are allowed to emit an equal amount per person, a rule that favors Africa at the expense of high emitters such as the U.S. The least preferred rule is reduction proportional to historical emissions. Using two different treatments, one where the respondents were informed about the country names and one where the country names were replaced with anonymous labels A-D, we also test whether people’s preferences for effort-sharing rules depend on the framing of the problem. We find that while the ranking of the principles is the same in both treatments, the strength of the preferences is significantly increased when the actual names of the countries are used.
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- Carlsson, Fredrik, 1968, et al.
(author)
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Paying for Mitigation: A Multiple Country Study
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Unique survey data from a contingent valuation study conducted in three different countries (China, Sweden, and the United States) were used to investigate the ordinary citizen’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing CO2 emissions. We find that a large majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase. A smaller share of Americans, however, believes these statements, when compared to the Chinese and Swedes. A larger share of Americans is also pessimistic and believes that nothing can be done to stop climate change. We also find that Sweden has the highest WTP for reductions of CO2, while China has the lowest. Thus, even though the Swedes and Chinese are similar to each other in their attitudes toward climate change, they differ considerably in their WTP. When WTP is measured as a share of household income, the willingness to pay is the same for Americans and Chinese, while again higher for the Swedes.
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6. |
- Carlsson, Fredrik, 1968, et al.
(author)
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The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth - A Multiple Country Test of an Oath Script
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and emissions reductions, we took advantage of the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics that addresses the effects of making promises, in order to investigate the effect of an oath script in a contingent valuation survey. The survey was conducted in Sweden and China, and its results indicate that an oath script has significant effects on respondent behavior in answering willingness-to-pay (WTP) questions, some of which vary by country. In both countries, the share of zero WTP responses and extremely high WTP responses decreases when an oath script is used, which also results in lower variance. In China, the oath script also reduces the average WTP, cutting it by half in certain instances. We also found that the oath script has different impacts on various respondent groups. For example, without the oath script, Communist party members in China are more likely than others to have a positive WTP for emissions reductions, but with the oath script, there is no longer any difference between the groups.
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