Lessons for the International Policy Community

Abstract

The nations of the world confront a tremendous challenge in designing and implementing an international policy response to the threat of global climate change that is scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic. It is broadly acknowledged that the relatively wealthy, developed countries are responsible for a majority of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have already accumulated in the atmosphere, but developing countries will emit more GHGs over this century than the currently industrialized nations if no efforts are taken to alter their course of development. The architecture of a robust international climate change policy will need to take into account the many dimensions and consequences of this issue with respect to the environment, the economy, energy, and development. Drawing upon lessons from experience with the Kyoto Protocol (Schmalensee) and insights from economics, political science, international relations, legal scholarship, and other disciplines, the contributors to the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements have set forth a range of ideas about how best to construct a post-2012 international climate change policy regime. The targets-and-timetables approach embodied in the Kyoto agreement appears here in proposals advanced by Jeffrey Frankel, Denny Ellerman, Larry Karp and Jinhua Zhao, and Jing Cao. A second category of international climate policy architectures – harmonized domestic policies – is represented in proposals by Scott Barrett, Judson Jaffe and Robert Stavins, Richard Cooper, and Akihiro Sawa. And one proposal by Judson Jaffe and Robert Stavins falls in a third category: decentralized, bottom-up approaches that rely primarily on coordinated, unilateral national policies.