Author: Ritu Mathur & Manish Shrivastava, TERI, India
India’s future energy scenario poses increasing challenges on account of energy security as well as environmental considerations.
With an installed generating capacity of less than 150,000 MW and a per capita consumption of a mere 650 units of electricity per annum, India is plagued with huge electricity shortages, estimated at around 11 per cent in energy terms and almost 12 per cent in peak demand in 2008/09. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale
The political debate in Australia is currently consumed by a furious stoush over climate change policy.
Sensing sufficient support from the independents and Greens, who hold the balance of power over the minority government, Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has declared battle once more in the off-again, on-again campaign to introduce a national carbon price (this time via the transition of declaring a price on carbon and later moving to an emissions trading scheme). Read more…
Author: Ross Garnaut, ANU and University of Melbourne
Human induced climate change is a global problem and an effective solution requires large mitigation contributions from all major developed and developing countries, and from the rest of the world too.
The search for effective climate change policy is partly a search for effective cooperation amongst countries of a kind and dimension that has never previously been known on a global scale. Read more…
Author: Frank Jotzo, ANU
Climate change policy is alive again in Australia. Prime Minister Gillard has committed to introduce a carbon price during the current term of government. A Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change is at work, and an update to the Garnaut Review takes a fresh look at some of the tough issues facing the world and Australia in getting good climate policy off the ground.
Getting carbon pricing off the ground may seem a tall order after the attempt of the previous government under Kevin Rudd to introduce emissions trading failed among a collapsed deal with the opposition (whose leader Malcolm Turnbull was deposed over the issue), considering that the current government’s needs rely on votes by Independents and the Greens to get any legislation through Parliament, and in the context of setbacks in US climate policy and widespread (if largely misplaced) disappointment with the international climate negotiations. Read more…
Author: Mutsuyoshi Nishimura, Advisor to the Cabinet, Government of Japan
The international approach to climate change is currently based upon the arbitrary ambitions of nations.
Although these bottom up attitudes have propelled huge climate investment, no goals have been set in relation to climate stability. Future generations will surely ask why such investments did not achieve climate stability. Read more…
Author: Ambuj Sagar, IIT
The twin climate challenges of mitigation and adaption are two of the defining problems of the 21st century, particularly for developing countries. They come at a time when many of these countries’ economies are growing rapidly, leading to large increases in energy demand. Because many developing countries are situated in areas particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, these problems are particularly serious.
But while these problems are serious, they are by no means insurmountable. They are challenges that can be met, in part, by the development of technology. Read more…
Author: Peter J. Wood, ANU
The UNFCCC COP16 climate conference has come to a successful conclusion with a series of decisions that are known as the Cancún Agreements. On the morning of the final day, there were tense moments, and it was unclear whether there would be much progress at all. But after the draft texts were circulated, the Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinosa, convened an ‘informal plenary’ where she said that in these texts, every Party had been listened to, and after two hours for people to examine the texts, the plenary will reconvene. There was then sustained applause and a standing ovation. From that moment on, there was a great sense of hope that there would be a positive outcome.
The main decision results from the work of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action. Read more…
Author: Peter J. Wood, ANU
In the final days of the COP16/CMP6 Conference, the negotiators at Cancún are currently trying to negotiate a ‘balanced package’ – also known as a ‘six-pack’, which combines progress on mitigation, transparency (measurement, reporting and verification – or MRV), adaptation, finance, technology, and REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). The Mexicans are extremely determined to get some sort of outcome from the conference – both for the climate and for multilateral negotiations. They so far seem to have been quite confident in the way that they have facilitated the negotiations, and there seems to be much more trust in the Mexicans from the parties than there was for the Danes last year.
What is uncertain is how ‘good’ the decisions will be – in terms of criteria such as ambition (including capacity to ramp up ambition later), efficiency and equity; how detailed the decisions will be; and whether there is sufficient consensus to get a package of decisions at all. Read more…
Author: Artyom Lukin, FENU
On 22-23 November 2010, the first Intergovernmental Consultation Meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific’s Subregional Office for East and North-East Asia (SRO-ENEA) was held at Incheon, Republic of Korea. The meeting attended by government officials, high-level international and national experts as well as representatives from NGOs became the first major event organised by ESCAP’s new subregional office in Northeast Asia.
The Incheon-based office was officially inaugurated in May 2010. Read more…
Author: Jonas Parello-Plesner, European Council on Foreign Relations
There are a couple of certainties about Cancun. It will not bring a global deal. The US will try to focus the agenda on a lack of transparency in China’s emissions control efforts — to cover the fact that the US also brings nothing substantial to the table and is stuck in an anachronistic, fuel-guzzling economy and mindset. Chinese negotiators will arrive with their usual arguments, but equipped with better PR techniques for making sure they aren’t seen as the game stopper — the real lesson they took away from Copenhagen. The poorer countries will clamour for more aid for both mitigation and adaption to climate change. The EU’s credibility among other key players will be slightly dented by its current internal skirmishes on moving from 20 per cent to 30 per cent reductions by 2020. At the end of these two weeks in Mexico, those who aspire to a global deal will be directed towards 2011 and South Africa, and few will believe that it can happen there either. Finally, the summit will be a lot warmer than Copenhagen, and the general world temperature will continue to rise, as the scientists keep telling us.
The conclusion is that big global deals are off – at least for the time being. That’s the short, and somewhat depressing, summary. Read more…
Author: Amitendu Palit, NUS
Oil, gas and coal are three critical natural resources playing major roles in economic growth. All three are essential for augmenting manufacturing and services outputs and increasing national gross domestic product (GDP). Economic histories of China and India for the last two to three decades underline their increasing reliance on these fossil fuels for sustaining high economic growth. Given their current growth trajectories, which are not only high but also manufacturing and services intensive, there is little possibility of them reducing their dependence on these energy sources.
Both countries are in search of energy-efficient processes. However, achieving energy efficiency is not easy. Read more…
Author: Peter Sheehan, Victoria University
The COP15 meeting at Copenhagen in December 2009 has been a watershed in international climate negotiations, both in terms of outcomes and of our understanding of the problems involved in reaching agreement. Widely regarded as a failure because no universal, binding agreement to reduce emissions was achieved, it did produce two notable outcomes: a shared commitment to hold peak global warming to less than 2⁰C and the provision by many countries, under the framework of the Copenhagen Accord, of new commitments to reduce future emissions. It also sharpened debate about what type of agreement should be aimed for – top down or bottom up, legally binding or not, and so on.
As observed in the East Asia Forum by Dr Stephen Howes, COP15 collapsed under the weight of inflated expectations. Read more…
Author: Seiji Ikkatai, Kyoto University
Japan’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the 1990 base year to 2007 have been increasing en route to achieving the 2008-12 Kyoto Protocol target of 6 per cent reduction. Since 1997, when Japan adopted the Protocol, a raft of climate change mitigation policies have been developed to reduce emissions across different sectors. A set of voluntary mechanisms, strongly advocated by the Japanese Federation of Economic Organisations, have been implemented to reduce emissions in the industry sector. For households and offices, the main measures used to reduce emissions have been environmental education and information dissemination. Some regulations have been introduced that can improve energy efficiency, but they cannot influence GHG emission volumes.
Moreover, there are subsidies and tax reductions or exemptions available to assist in replacing old facilities with highly energy-efficient ones, especially among small industries. Read more…
Author: Junichi Fujino, NIES
It is highly likely that there is going to be a gap between the Kyoto Protocol commitment period (2008-2012) and the commitment period thereafter. Industrialised countries such as Japan and the United States are facing difficulties passing climate change bills. Under such circumstances, it will be difficult to expect an agreement on a post-Kyoto framework at the 16th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico. Even if the international community were able to agree on one at COP17 next year, it would nonetheless be difficult to obtain a sufficient number of ratifications for it to enter into force in 2012.
One Chinese energy expert stated recently, in conversation on the topic of China’s target for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, ‘China has played the card of reducing emissions regardless of what other states do. The United States has not yet passed the bill through Congress. Japan’s plan is conditional, leaving its actual emissions cut uncertain. Now it is your turn to play a card.’ Read more…
Author: Yuhan Zhang, Carnegie Endowment
Climate change has become the most difficult collective action problem our world has ever faced. It cannot be resolved by a single country taking unilateral action. Together, the US and China are responsible for more than 40 per cent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Their emissions have had dire impacts on the global climate. As the world’s two largest emitters, the US and China should take robust action.
First, policymakers and interest groups in both countries must completely abandon the non-cooperation strategy. Read more…
