The Cop 15 is a bitter disappointment for European countries. While environment is one of the domains in which EU integration is deepest, European countries failed to build and support a common position that would have weighed on the outcome of the conference.
But the EU could try to make the Copenhagen Accord more ambitious and credible. How? Forgetting Kyoto – Stéphane Hallegatte suggests – recognizing that it is an important progress to have included the United States and China in a unique agreement and answering to four questions
Content about: carbon market
A potential global agreement on climate change will be limited to a political agreement, instead of being the long expected treaty that would extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 and further enhance the Climate convention. Couldn’t President Obama offer a tangible political gesture to the world community and thereby restore leadership and credibility for the US in the climate negotiations?
In this article, economist Henry Tulkens suggest that the Obama administration negotiates a deal in Copenhagen by which the US would buy a quantity of emission units corresponding to all emissions exceeding its Kyoto target over the commitment period 2008-2012, some of the money being allocated to adaptation funding in developing countries.
Some climate policies constitutes a win-win solution for climate and development. Authors at Cired analyze the potential for implementing synergies between climate and development looking at the case of India, where power sector is characterized by many institutional and market failures, capacity shortage and structural underinvestment.
A carbon price only scenario will induce prohibitive macroeconomic costs, authors say, but enlarge the spectrum of climate policies and synergies between climate policies and development policies should be used for mitigation cost assessment