Activities implemented jointly: another look at the facts

Abstract

The first Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Berlin established a pilot phase of so-called Activities Implemented Jointly (AIJ). This pilot phase started in 1995 and was to end in 1999. It was prolonged at the fourth Conference of the Parties in Buenos Aires (1998) for a yet undetermined period after 2000. This paper is an empirical study of AIJ experience in the first five years (1995–1999) based on 96 AIJ from the UNFCCC’s web site as of April 30, 1999, and a separate study on seven AIJ projects of Japan. The main results of this study are: (1) AIJ investment shows a pattern of regional-specificity with rather divergent regional investment portfolios in the United States, Japan and Europe. This pattern can be traced back to differences in the national AIJ programs of investors and hosts, on the one hand, and to specific ways of minimizing transaction cost on the other, e.g. by attaching AIJ to established institutional links of development co-operation or by ‘trading in the neighbourhood’; and (2) AIJs are overwhelmingly no regret-measures with almost zero or negative cost. Transaction costs of reporting have been minimized by applying simple and straightforward methods of baseline determination. The exception to this is the verification procedure where expensive external verification prevails.