Domestic Climate Research Articles

A Pragmatic Approach to Carbon Border Measures

AbstractThis article offers the justification for a type of carbon customs union in which countries with a diverse range of high-ambition domestic climate measures would adopt a common external tariff on carbon intensive imports from countries outside the union. We explain why any pragmatic approach to carbon border measures (CBMs) is likely to create problems under prevailing interpretations of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) primary rules. Given the urgency of the climate crisis and the fact that the legality of a CBM – no matter how designed – will be a question of first impression for any WTO dispute panel, WTO consistency should take a backseat to considerations of domestic legal and political feasibility in designing a CBM. Instead of trying to fit a CBM into current understandings of WTO rules, WTO members should renegotiate WTO rules to permit a range of aggressive, but likely trade-restrictive, decarbonization measures. Having said that, we also recognize that WTO negotiations may take longer than optimal from a decarbonization standpoint. We therefore suggest an approach that would allow WTO members to take advantage of flexibilities that existing WTO rules afford.

An industrial policy framework for transforming energy and emissions intensive industries towards zero emissions

ABSTRACT The target of zero emissions sets a new standard for industry and industrial policy. Industrial policy in the twenty-first century must aim to achieve zero emissions in the energy and emissions intensive industries. Sectors such as steel, cement, and chemicals have so far largely been sheltered from the effects of climate policy. A major shift is needed, from contemporary industrial policy that mainly protects industry to policy strategies that transform the industry. For this purpose, we draw on a wide range of literatures including engineering, economics, policy, governance, and innovation studies to propose a comprehensive industrial policy framework. The policy framework relies on six pillars: directionality, knowledge creation and innovation, creating and reshaping markets, building capacity for governance and change, international coherence, and sensitivity to socio-economic implications of phase-outs. Complementary solutions relying on technological, organizational, and behavioural change must be pursued in parallel and throughout whole value chains. Current policy is limited to supporting mainly some options, e.g. energy efficiency and recycling, with some regions also adopting carbon pricing, although most often exempting the energy and emissions intensive industries. An extended range of options, such as demand management, materials efficiency, and electrification, must also be pursued to reach zero emissions. New policy research and evaluation approaches are needed to support and assess progress as these industries have hitherto largely been overlooked in domestic climate policy as well as international negotiations. Key policy insights Energy and emission intensive industries can no longer be complacent about the necessity of zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Zero emissions require profound technology and organizational changes across whole material value chains, from primary production to reduced demand, recycling and end-of-life of metals, cement, plastics, and other materials. New climate and industrial policies are necessary to transform basic materials industries, which are so far relatively sheltered from climate mitigation. It is important to complement technology R&D with the reshaping of markets and strengthened governance capacities in this emerging policy domain. Industrial transformation can be expected to take centre stage in future international climate policy and negotiations.

Domestic and international climate policies: complementarity or disparity?

Climate change is a global crisis that requires countries to act on both domestic and international levels. This paper examines how climate policies in these two arenas are related and to what extent domestic and international climate ambitions are complementary or disparate. While scholarly work has begun to assess the variation in overall climate policy ambition, only a few studies to date have tried to explain whether internationally ambitious countries are ambitious at home and vice versa. According to the common view, countries that are more ambitious at home can also be expected to be more ambitious abroad. Many scholars, however, portray the relationship instead as disparate, whereby countries need to walk a tightrope between the demands of their domestic constituencies on the one hand and international pressures on the other, while preferring the former over the latter. This study uses quantitative methods and employs data from the OECD DAC dataset on climate finance to measure international climate ambitions. Overall, the present work makes two major contributions. First, it provides evidence that international climate financing ambition is complementary to domestic climate ambition. Second, the article identifies the conditional effect of domestic ambition—with regard to responsibility, vulnerability, carbon-intensive industry and economic capacity—on international climate ambition.

Bangladesh: From a Climate Victim to the Climate Leader

Bangladesh has registered a great success in global climate diplomacy by abandoning its passivity and dependence syndrome as a climate victim. What criteria did Bangladesh fulfil to reckon with as a climate leader? Is such iteration self-proclaimed rhetoric, or can it be supported by theoretical and empirical findings? This article investigates these questions by adopting a leadership framework and scrutinizing Bangladesh's role in climate change adaptation, mitigation, negotiation, and knowledge creation. This article reveals that Bangladesh is now acting as an emerging climate leader in the global climate arena. Bangladesh provides unilateral leadership in climate issues through establishing 'good examples' in inspiring others to follow the pathway by drafting multiple domestic climate policies such as the National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA), Climate Change Trust Fund, Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, etc. In addition, Bangladesh assists other climate-vulnerable countries by sharing ideas, knowledge, practice and invention in climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience and acts as an intellectual leader. Finally, in climate change negotiations, Bangladesh performs as a problem-solving leader on behalf of the Least Developed Countries. Bangladesh's image as a robust actor with a timely response to climate issues turns it into a legitimate voice on global platforms. Therefore, this article concludes that calling Bangladesh a climate leader is not rhetoric as it shows robust performance in several leadership modes to solve this global collective action problem.

The Role of Temperature Change, Ambient Temperature, and Relative Humidity in Allergic Conjunctivitis in a US Veteran Population

Studies have implicated temperature and humidity in the pathogenesis of allergic conjunctivitis (AC), as these conditions facilitate air particulate and aeroallergen dispersion and tear film instability. Research also suggests that variation in temperature is associated with risk of asthma, but similar data are limited for AC. This study examined associations between several meteorologic conditions, including temperature variation, and AC visit risk. Retrospective, case-crossover study. Data on individuals diagnosed with AC (via International Classification of Diseases-Ninth Edition [ICD-9]) at a Veterans Affairs clinic from January 2010-December 2013 was extracted. Local climate data were obtained from the National Climactic Data Center. Utilizing a case-crossover design, all cases were assigned a random control date 90-250 days prior to diagnosis. Daily time-lagged exposures were computed for 30-day lags. The associations between temperature, temperature variation (standard deviation [SD] of temperature), relative humidity (RH), and temperature-RH interaction with visit risk were examined via multivariate logistic regression models both at the national level and across domestic climate regions. Overall, 74,951 subjects made 116,162 visits for AC. Prevalence was highest in spring (>10% April-May) in the Northeast (NE) and Southeast (SE) (>15%), and lowest in winter (<6.1% December-February) in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) (<5%). AC visit risk was positively associated with temperature (OR 1.028, P < .001), SD of temperature (OR 1.054, P < .01), and temperature-RH interaction (OR 1.0003, P < .01), whereas it was negatively associated with RH (OR 0.998, P < .001). Regionally, the PNW, NE, and Lower Midwest (LMW) accounted for the strongest associations. Temperature, temperature variation, and RH associated with AC visit risk. Observed associations were strongest in northern regions, like the PNW.

Federalism and Mitigating Climate Change: The Merits of Flexibility, Experimentalism, and Dissonance

Abstract Federalism is ostensibly misplaced to mitigate climate change as a global public concern as it is prone to import the inadequate incentive structures existing at the international level into the domestic domain. Drawing from the legal structures and procedures of Swiss federalism, this article attempts to provide a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between laws designed to mitigate climate change and federalism. It seeks to demonstrate that federalism may support effective policies to mitigate climate change, provided that the architecture of domestic climate change law meets certain criteria. These include considerable federal powers, a degree of institutional flexibility, robust formal channels of influence for subnational actors on policy formulation at the federal level, ample room for regulatory experimentalism at the lower layers of federalism, and the ‘right to act’ conferred on the Federation to avoid political impasse among the constituent units.

A Patchwork of Climate Policies that Reflect Subnational Jurisdiction

The United Nations introduced the Paris Agreement in 2015 aimed at reducing emissions globally. Signatories to the Agreement are responsible for amending their domestic climate policies and implementing binding emission targets. Federations confront several challenges when adopting such policies since jurisdiction is shared between orders of government. This paper explores why Canadian and American federal governance structures constrain the implementation of national climate policies following the Paris Agreement. Despite both countries having ratified the Agreement, climate action in Canada and the US is enacted in a patchwork fashion that reflects subnational jurisdiction. The paper begins by assessing the Paris Agreement and the challenges federations confront when adopting climate legislation. The following section examines the Canadian and American federations separately to identify the factors that inhibit a coordinated response to reducing national emissions post-2015. The paper concludes by exploring strategies to advance climate action on a subnational basis.

Techno-economic and environmental assessment of methane oxidation layer measures through small-scale clean development mechanism – The case of the Seychelles

Unclosed coastal landfills in small island developing states are major sources of greenhouse gases and other environmental impacts. This is a major problem for sustainable waste management systems mainly due to the lack of economic resources. The clean development mechanism (CDM) appears as a possibility to facilitate sustainable financing. Implementing a methane oxidation layer (MOL) emerges as a feasible technical option for this kind of small landfills since landfill gas extraction is usually not viable. This paper presents a techno-economic and environmental assessment of MOL implementation in the Providence landfill (Seychelles) as a small-scale CDM measure. Results show that the MOL measure could avoid by 2030 between 94 and 20 kt CO2 eq. Concerning profitability, results clearly show that it depends on the existence of stabilized biomass material within the island. Thus, the MOL measure starts to be profitable in some scenarios for certified emission reductions (CER) prices higher than 26 €/t CO2 eq. that seem possible depending on the emissions’ market development. When not profitable under CDM, the MOL measure might be used to reduce CO2 emissions from the domestic climate effort under the Paris Agreement since the unitary abatement costs is between 10 and 423 €/t CO2 eq. Moreover, the MOL measure contributes to the sustainable development goals (SDG) achievement – mainly SDG8, SDG13, and SDG14. Finally, results call for a prompt action in Seychelles since the sooner the MOL is implemented after the landfill is closed, the more profitable.

The Paris agreement and key actors' domestic climate policy mixes: comparative patterns.

This article examines two important conditions for achieving the Paris Agreement’s (PA) ambitious goals. The first is the actions of the largest emitters—China, the European Union (EU) and the USA whose combined share of global emissions is near 50%. The second condition is the bottom–up design of the PA itself. Drawing on the policy mix literature and comparison of the three major emitters examined in this special feature (see Bang, Heggelund and Skjærseth), we first conclude that the EU has the most ambitious climate targets and policy mixes needed for achieving net zero emissions. Second, the PA has contributed to more ambitious targets and policy mixes mainly in the EU but also in China. Ambitious EU actors have actively invoked the PA goals to further their interests and legalize the Agreement’s dynamic five-year cycles. With Biden as president the USA will again be a party to the PA and is set to join the EU and China in upgrading ambitions. Looking towards the future, the USA and particularly China will have to, in one way or another, to follow the EU if net zero emissions are to be achieved. This may necessitate actual EU leadership by example.

Climate justice and rights-based litigation in a post-Paris world

ABSTRACT In spite of the 2015 Paris Agreement requiring all Parties, irrespective of their development status, to take climate action, the operationalization of climate justice in global climate governance and policy has been fraught. Other avenues, such as litigation, have emerged as a policy tool for seeking redress for past and prospective harm resulting from climate change. The academic and policy literatures have, however, had limited engagement with the role of rights-based litigation in climate governance since Paris. We help fill this gap by developing the four-component OATH (Objective, Associated climate impact, Type of justice, Harm) framework and applying it to three high-profile climate litigation cases – Urgenda v. The Netherlands, Juliana v. United States, and Demanda v. Minambiente. Our analysis confirms that the progress and achievements of these cases demonstrate the potential of climate litigation to force greater national and sub-national government action on climate change. However, litigation better serves some types of justice (e.g. intergenerational) than others (e.g. distributive). Therefore, as its ambition and progress continue to grow, litigation must be combined with other forms of climate action to better advance justice in a post-Paris world. Key policy insights International climate agreements and obligations are important to the success of climate litigation. Climate litigation can be used to hold countries accountable to the commitments they communicate in their NDCs and other policy instruments, but it should be used as one of several policy tools. Litigation pertaining to climate adaptation should and can be expanded to support and advance justice. Distributive justice cannot be sufficiently advanced through domestic climate litigation so it must be further incorporated into international climate agreements and obligations. The universal right to a clean environment, its definition and criteria should be (a) established in international environmental agreements and obligations, and (b) aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Актуальные аспекты управления строительным предприятием при замещении традиционного менеджмента интерактивным

Currently, construction companies in Russia are increasingly facing a lack of a high-quality human resources (HR). Many such companies apply the principles of conventional management. This approach hinders innovation and reduces employees’ motivation, which factors eventually decrease the cost-effectiveness of enterprises. Conversely, innovative management implies the maximum involvement of employees in the work process, a feeling of self-esteem and attention from managers. In this work, an analysis of conventional and interactive management is conducted to determine the most effective approach to HR management. An SNW-analysis of a construction company was carried out to reveal the dependence between the stable functioning of an enterprise and the strengths and weaknesses of HR policy. In addition, the methods of logical analysis were used. The analysis and identification of weaknesses in the internal structure of the construction company resulted in an improvement strategy of work organisation by using interactive management. Interactive management provides each employee with an opportunity to realise their potential in profession and career. It can be concluded that both the intellectual and emotional recognition of employees is an important component in building an effective enterprise strategy. Such cooperation contributes to the improvement of the domestic climate in the enterprise, which has a beneficial effect on the production and standards in real estate management.

What is Climate Law?

There has been little scholarly consideration of what climate law is, and no settled definition of climate law has yet emerged. I show that climate law is best conceived of as having two forms: a law that compels action and a law that incentivizes it (other than through compulsion). Both forms of climate law can be found at the domestic level, but at the international level only varieties of the former (prescriptive) law exist. The important insight offered in this short article is that a fundamental difference exists between international climate law and domestic climate law that goes beyond the difference in prescriptive and incentivizing law and has to do with the logic of the problem of climate change, viz. that the problem cannot be solved except through a collective response.

A Guide to Assessing the Political Economy of Domestic Climate Change Governance

Despite clear scientific evidence that swift and ambitious climate action is necessary at the national level, many countries, particularly those with high emissions and GDP, are failing to implement policies to curb their climate impact. Even with high incomes, access to technology, policy expertise, and capacity to adapt these countries face a massive roadblock to avoiding the human suffering and immense economic, social, and ecological costs that will result from unchecked climate change – political will. This working paper provides guidance and a methodology for decision-makers, civil society, and donors to assess the political and governance challenges that different climate actions are likely to encounter at the national level. With these insights, they can focus on the best approaches for enacting ambitious policies that provide visible benefits and are hard to overturn.

Federalism and Mitigating Climate Change: The Merits of Flexibility, Experimentalism, and Dissonance

Federalism is ostensibly misplaced to mitigate climate change as a global public concern as it is prone to import the inadequate incentive structures existing at the international level into the domestic domain. Drawing from the legal structures and procedures of Swiss federalism, this article attempts to provide a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between laws designed to mitigate climate change and federalism. It seeks to demonstrate that federalism may support effective policies to mitigate climate change, provided that the architecture of domestic climate change law meets certain criteria. These include considerable federal powers, a degree of institutional flexibility, robust formal channels of influence for subnational actors on policy formulation at the federal level, ample room for regulatory experimentalism at the lower layers of federalism, and the ‘right to act’ conferred on the Federation to avoid political impasse among the constituent units.

Climate Policy and Ecological Modernization Processes in the Republic of Kazakhstan and Russia

The article examines the climate policy of Russia and Kazakhstan in the period between the years 1990 and 2020. The position of the countries during the international negotiations on the formation of global climate regimes, the causes and factors affecting foreign and domestic climate policy are analyzed. The main actions and institutional changes in Russia and Kazakhstan aimed at the achievement of climate commitments are considered as well. Moreover, the key national programs on ecological modernisation of farms are discussed. The ecaluationt of the development level of various instruments of climate policy in both countries is provided. In conclusion the comparative scheme of climate activities in Russia and the Republic of Kazakhstan , designed by the authors, is presented.

Financing Climate Action and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of 17 Developing Countries

To meet the Paris Agreement’s long-term goals, it is crucial that developed countries support developing countries in achieving their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and mobilizing the required climate finance. For this paper, we analyzed the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on climate finance and climate action implementation in 17 developing countries, drawing on available information from climate-finance tracking tools, reports, and climate needs assessments. Our analysis shows a decrease in climate finance flowing to developing countries. Most of this funding took the form of loans, and developing countries have reallocated or decreased their domestic climate flows because of the high costs of responding to the pandemic. As a result, climate-related projects have been delayed. Compounding the challenge, some developing countries have had to deal with major natural disasters amid the pandemic. Improved transparency through climate-finance tracking tools could help countries more easily identify their conditional and unconditional climate needs and mobilize and deploy resources more effectively. Climate-finance availability continues to fall short of the required amount of resources to implement developing countries’ NDCs and meet the Paris Agreement goals. The COVID-19 pandemic is widening this gap. Developed countries need to strengthen their commitment to close it by increasing climate finance.

Enhancing the efficacy of climate change litigation: how to resolve the ‘fair share question’ in the context of international human rights law

The ambiguity surrounding what constitutes a State's fair share of the global burden of mitigating climate change has undermined the ability of domestic climate change litigation to bring about emissions reductions which are collectively capable of meeting the goal of the Paris Agreement. When confronted with challenges to the adequacy of States' mitigation efforts, domestic courts have also drawn on States' international human rights law obligations. This paper argues that when applying these obligations, the uncertainty surrounding the fair share question must be resolved so as to ensure individual mitigation obligations which are collectively consistent with the Paris Agreement. The analysis focuses on the obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and outlines how general principles of law applicable in situations involving causal uncertainty could be invoked to address the fair share question.

The domestic and international implications of future climate for U.S. agriculture in GCAM.

Agricultural crop yields are susceptible to changes in future temperature, precipitation, and other Earth system factors. Future changes to these physical Earth system attributes and their effects on agricultural crop yields are highly uncertain. United States agricultural producers will be affected by such changes whether they occur domestically or internationally through international commodity markets. Here we present a replication study of previous investigations (with different models) showing that potential direct domestic climate effects on crop yields in the U.S. have financial consequences for U.S. producers on the same order of magnitude but opposite in sign to indirect financial impacts on U.S. producers from climate effects on crop yields elsewhere in the world. We conclude that the analysis of country-specific financial climate impacts cannot ignore indirect effects arising through international markets. We find our results to be robust across a wide range of potential future crop yield impacts analyzed in the multi-sector dynamic global model GCAM.

Ireland’s Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015: Symbolic Legislation, Systemic Litigation, Stepping Stone?

“Serious planning and environmental law of a domestic variety are all but non-existent in Ireland,” wrote Dillon in 1999. While much has changed legally in Ireland since then, domestic environmental law innovations remain relatively rare, and politically, strong vestiges of reluctance persist when it comes to environmental policy and law. Addressing the European Parliament in 2018, the Taoiseach (head of government) Leo Varadkar described Ireland as a “laggard” when it comes to climate change, and this is confirmed by international rankings and by Ireland’s high per capita emissions, the third highest in the EU. Several interrelated factors are key to understanding Ireland’s general approach to climate change and its specific approach to domestic climate legislation.

Media Coverage and Perceived Policy Influence of Environmental Actors: Good Strategy or Pyrrhic Victory?

In this article we analyze how media coverage for environmental actors (individual environmental activists and environmental movement organizations) is associated with their perceived policy influence in Canadian climate change policy networks. We conceptualize media coverage as the total number of media mentions an actor received in Canada’s two main national newspapers—the &lt;em&gt;Globe and Mail&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;National Post&lt;/em&gt;. We conceptualize perceived policy influence as the total number of times an actor was nominated by other actors in a policy network as being perceived to be influential in domestic climate change policy making in Canada. Literature from the field of social movements, agenda setting, and policy networks suggests that environmental actors who garner more media coverage should be perceived as more influential in policy networks than actors who garner less coverage. We assess support for this main hypothesis in two ways. First, we analyze how actor attributes (such as the type of actor) are associated with the amount of media coverage an actor receives. Second, we evaluate whether being an environmental actor shapes the association between media coverage and perceived policy influence. We find a negative association between media coverage and perceived policy influence for individual activists, but not for environmental movement organizations. This case raises fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of relations between media and policy spheres, and the efficacy of media for signaling and mobilizing policy influence.