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1.
Community energy initiatives can foster a sustainable energy transition by promoting sustainable energy behaviour in the communities in which they are embedded. This raises the question of what motivates people to become involved in these initiatives. We investigated the importance of financial, environmental, and communal motives for initiative involvement. We propose that communal motives (i.e., being involved in one’s local community) may be related to initiative involvement, as community energy initiatives not only aim to promote sustainable energy behaviour but also enable people to be involved in their community. Across three studies, respondents rated financial and environmental motives as more important than communal motives for their involvement in community energy initiatives. Yet, environmental and communal motives were uniquely related to initiative involvement, while financial motives were not. The discrepancy between which motives people rate as important and which motives actually relate to their initiative involvement suggests that financial motives are an overrated motive, while communal motives are an underrated motive for involvement in community energy initiatives. Our results suggest that targeting communal motives may be an additional way to enhance involvement in community energy initiatives and foster sustainable behaviour among people, who may not otherwise be interested in environmental protection.  相似文献   

2.
It is argued that the subordination of policies to results-based payments for emissions reductions causes severe economic inefficiencies, which affect the opportunity cost, transaction cost, and economic rent of the programme. Such problems can be addressed by establishing sound procedural, land, and financial governance at the national level, before Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) economic incentives are delivered at scale. Consideration is given to each governance dimension, the entry points for policy intervention, and the impact on costs. International support must consider the financial and political cost of governance reforms, and use a pay-for-results ethos based on output and outcome indicators. This can be done in the readiness phase but only if the latter's legal force, scope, magnitude, and time horizon are adequately reconsidered. This article provides ammunition for the institutionalists’ argument that United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Parties must prioritize governance reforms between now and the entry into force of the new climate agreement in 2020. Finally, specific recommendations about how such governance reforms can be achieved, which will create the basis for the programme's financial sustainability, are offered.

Policy relevance

UNFCCC Parties could make the most cost-effective use of REDD+ resources if they were to prioritize investments in governance over the interim period 2012–2020. REDD+’s financial, technical and political capital should be used to establish sound procedural, sectoral (land), and financial governance systems in relevant countries. This will generate long-term economic savings, compared to an approach that privileges the implementation of results-based payments for emissions reductions. In particular, it will reduce economic inefficiencies, which affect the opportunity and transaction costs, and the private rents embedded in the current programme design. In order to promote the necessary policy reforms, stakeholders should work together to address technical, financial, and political economy issues at the domestic level. In particular, UNFCCC Parties should re-conceptualize the readiness phase by strengthening its legal force, expanding its scope, increasing its financial firepower, and extending its time horizon.  相似文献   

3.
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) has been suggested as a climate change mitigation strategy that is based on the philosophy to reward countries for reducing their deforestation and forest degradation by financial benefits via the generation of carbon credits. While the potential of REDD has been widely discussed, minor attention has been drawn to the implication of uncertainties and costs associated with the estimation of carbon stock changes. To raise awareness of these issues, we conducted a simulation study for a set of countries that show high to low deforestation rates, which demonstrates that the potential to generate benefits from REDD depends highly on the magnitude of the total error while assessment costs and the price of carbon credits play a minor role. For countries with low deforestation rates REDD is obviously not an option for generating benefits as they would need to implement monitoring systems that are able to estimate carbon stock changes with a total error well below 1 %. Total errors feasible under operational monitoring systems are only sufficient to gain revenues from REDD-regimes under high deforestation rates.  相似文献   

4.
Climate shocks are argued to affect the likelihood of conflict through individual economic outcomes that change the individual opportunity costs of participation in violent activities. Studies testing this proposition, however, either fail to answer convincingly because they use aggregated data, because they rely on observed controls and strong assumptions about variable independence, or because their study sample is restricted to particular conflicts. This article uses two rounds in Afrobarometer where respondents were asked about participation in politically motivated violence as well as how their living conditions had changed in the last year. To get around endogeneity problems, perceived changes in living conditions are instrumented using a standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI). The study finds that participation in violence would, on average, have been more likely if an individual experienced a deterioration of living conditions than if it had not, in the subpopulation in Africa whose living conditions are affected by droughts.  相似文献   

5.
The establishment of a carbon market assumes that there is an effective means of transforming price information into technical carbon reduction measures. However, empirical evidence reveals that the links between price information and carbon management strategies are far from obvious. To understand how delegating CO2 responsibility affects CO2 trading behaviour, this article proposes a neo-institutionalist approach to answering the question of why companies became sellers, buyers or a combination of both during phase I of the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Original data from a survey on companies that participated in this scheme were collected and analysed. It was assumed that the trading scheme offered two ways to delegate decisions regarding emissions trading: decoupling from technical knowledge and financialization (i.e. delegating to financial departments) or coupling using technicalization (i.e. delegating to manufacturing departments). The results support the hypothesis that a company that adopts a decoupling strategy is more likely to buy certificates to fulfil their emissions targets. Adopting a coupling strategy indicates that a company is more likely to become a seller, all else equal. Professional identity is the theoretical basis for this relationship. Delegating carbon management to different departments represents either a stronger coupling or a stronger decoupling from core technological processes.

Policy relevance

The transaction data from phase I of the EU ETS open new questions and possibilities regarding the reasons that drive selling and buying in companies. It is important to look not only at the traditional sources of transaction costs, but rather also at the reasons for these tensions. One important source is the professional education of the people in charge of the EU ETS. Tailored information that directly addresses the different professional backgrounds of managers working in both financial departments and more technical departments might help to lower these types of transaction costs. In today's context, important emitter countries, such as China and Korea, have launched their own emissions markets, copying many aspects of the EU ETS. For the positive development of these markets and as a way of establishing a global emissions market, these new schemes should learn from the EU ETS experience.  相似文献   

6.
Despite suffering significantly from the adverse impacts of climate change and human-induced hazards, many people at risk deliberately choose not to migrate from hazard-prone areas in coastal Bangladesh. As many of them encounter significant challenges in maintaining their livelihoods, ascertaining how and under what circumstances voluntary non-migration decisions occur is crucial. Only a handful of studies have investigated whether individuals and groups who decide to stay put in the face of climatic hazards consider their decision to be an adaptive action. In this regard, this study contributes to the existing literature by empirically investigating the voluntary non-migration decision as an adaptation strategy through an exploration of the factors affecting this decision. We employed a systematic random sampling technique and selected 627 respondents from two climatic hazard-prone coastal districts: Khulna and Satkhira. Using the Generalized Structural Equation Model (GSEM), we found that voluntary non-migrants (84% of total respondents) appeared to enjoy the significant advantage of access to their communities' basic need provision and social support. Furthermore, the social, psychological, and economic opportunities found at their existing location (e.g., better income prospects, affordable living costs, receipt of financial help during post-disaster periods, and skills allowing them to stay in that location), as well as their access to local natural resources, strengthened their social capital and thus influenced their desire to stay. Together, these factors enhanced people’s adaptability to climatic shocks and motivated them to choose voluntary non-migration as an adaptation option.  相似文献   

7.
This article outlines a critical gap in the assessment methodology used to estimate the macroeconomic costs and benefits of climate and energy policy, which could lead to misleading information being used for policy-making. We show that the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models that are typically used for assessing climate policy use assumptions about the financial system that sit at odds with the observed reality. These assumptions lead to ‘crowding out’ of capital and, because of the way the models are constructed, negative economic impacts (in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and welfare) from climate policy in virtually all cases.

In contrast, macro-econometric models, which follow non-equilibrium economic theory and adopt a more empirical approach, apply a treatment of the financial system that is more consistent with reality. Although these models also have major limitations, they show that green investment need not crowd out investment in other parts of the economy – and may therefore offer an economic stimulus. Our conclusion is that improvements in both modelling approaches should be sought with some urgency – both to provide a better assessment of potential climate and energy policy and to improve understanding of the dynamics of the global financial system more generally.

POLICY RELEVANCE

This article discusses the treatment of the financial system in the macroeconomic models that are used in assessments of climate and energy policy. It shows major limitations in approach that could result in misleading information being provided to policy-makers.  相似文献   


8.
Despite increased international commitment to disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction (DiDRR) people with disabilities remain largely unseen, unheard and unaccounted for in DRR processes and planning. This is most marked amongst women with disabilities who experience specific gender, disability and poverty-based disadvantages, which disasters exacerbate. Our research found that women with disabilities are disproportionally impacted by disasters and are the least able to access institutional support across the preparedness, response and recovery phases of disaster events. Furthermore, the increased threat of violence following disasters heightens their risk of additional harm. In the absence of formal supports women with disabilities have few choices but to rely upon the social capital of their households and neighbours for assistance. They ‘recover’ in whatever ways they can – through short-term loans, reduced food consumption and/or migration – each carry significant costs to their longer-term resilience. This paper unpacks the root causes of women with disabilities’ marginalisation in disaster contexts, many of which are extensions of exclusionary processes that play out in their daily lives. We also present steps to position women at the centre of DRR discourse, which will benefit all.  相似文献   

9.
Martin Wolf 《Climate Policy》2013,13(6):772-783
Is it possible for all of humanity to enjoy the standards of living of today's high-income countries? What would happen if these limits were reached, perhaps because of climate change or a shortage of natural resources essential to production? How would society manage – or fail to manage – such limits? Notwithstanding the current financial and economic crises, these are perhaps the biggest questions confronting our species (and of a host of other species, who are the victims of our decisions). The article begins by considering the biggest economic event of our lifetimes – the ‘great convergence’ and its implications for the demand for resources. The discussion then turns to a specific limit on our development, climate change, which is different from most other limits, because it involves a global public good: the atmosphere. What such limits might mean for our civilization is discussed. One can persuade people to tackle climate change only if those concerned with the dangers persuade ordinary people that action will not come at the expense of their prosperity.  相似文献   

10.
Climate change equity debates tend to focus on achieving a fair and global ‘allocation’ of emission rights among countries. Allocation proposals typically envision, if implicitly, two purposes for international emissions trading. First, trading is expected to serve as a cost-effective means of promoting compliance with emissions targets. Second, trading is posited as a means to generate financial transfers, typically from industrialized to transitioning and developing countries.This article investigates the common assumption that international emissions trading will effectively serve both of these purposes. We conclude that the two purposes might not be mutually supportive, and that efforts to use international emissions trading as a financial transfer mechanism may potentially undermine cost-effectiveness goals. International emissions trading on a global scale would create new risks in terms of both cost-effectiveness and environmental performance, some of which will be challenging to manage. In particular, uncertainties over market prices and trading eligibility, coupled with the costs of participation, may together be the Achilles heel of some allocation proposals that entail large financial transfers from industrialized to developing countries. Any proposal for an ‘equitable’ allocation of emission allowances, we conclude, must be cognizant of the risks and costs implied by a reliance on international emissions trading. We offer some suggestions to this end.  相似文献   

11.
Climate change and associated weather extremes and natural hazards have large impacts on the urban population of the Global South where population growth will rapidly increase the already large number of people who will be affected. Using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), we investigate how hot temperatures, manifested as heat stress, is affecting the intentions of moving among the urban population in three Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines). We conducted an online survey with 2219 respondents. Almost all respondents (98%) had experienced heat stress, albeit at different levels. When asked whether respondents would be likely to move away from their current locations because of heat, nearly a quarter (23%) reported that they were very likely to do so, and 50% that they probably would. Stronger moving intentions because of heat were associated with women and older people. Concerns about increases from damage from heat (threat appraisal) were more strongly associated with moving intentions than an understanding of the costs and benefits (coping appraisal). Among the threat appraisal, heat stress levels and risk perception were the strongest predictors of moving intentions because of heat. The results contrast with the findings of migration studies in response to sudden onset hazards and underpin the differences in adaptation behaviour in response to different climate change impacts. Moving away to cooler places as an adaptation strategy to heat may be challenging to foresee in terms of timing, capabilities, destination and potential costs because it may not happen soon. We strongly recommend further research on climate change migration of the urban population, including within urban and urban-to-urban movements. While many people move back after sudden onset disasters, heat potentially leads to permanent movements given it is likely to be better planned, and as the habitability of some places is increasingly compromised. Overall the effects of slow onset environmental hazards such as pollution and heat on migration warrant more research attention given the rapidity of urban population growth, particularly in the global south.  相似文献   

12.
In order to reach climate goals, governments need to gain support from their voters for the necessary policy interventions, such as carbon dioxide taxes. Previous research concludes that people often do not support and legitimize such taxes because they perceive them as unfair. However, the notion of fairness implies a multitude of factors and despite attempts of the previous research to further nuance people’s fairness perceptions, we currently lack a more precise understanding of what people mean when they regard carbon taxes as unfair. In this article, we thoroughly investigate this problem by using original survey data from YouGov collected in the United States in 2018 and analyzing open-ended survey responses on why people think carbon taxes are unfair. Applying structural topic modeling, we unpack the multi-dimensional meaning of unfairness, as perceived by the US population. The results from our analysis show that people regard carbon taxes based on gas pricing as unfair because they perceive gas prices already being high, because of the need to drive, unfairness for the poor or rural population, lack of trust in government, or considerations that the purpose of the tax is unjustified. These findings help provide a more nuanced policy design to address fairness concerns related to carbon taxes.  相似文献   

13.
How does financial performance risk affect investments in low-carbon electricity-generating technologies to achieve climate policy targets? A detailed risk simulation of price formation in the Great Britain wholesale power market is used to show that the increasing replacement of fossil facilities with wind, ceteris paribus, may cause a deterioration of the financial risk–return performance metrics for incremental investments. Low-carbon investments appear to be high risk, low return, and as such may require a progressively higher level of support over time than envisaged by the conventional degression trajectories. The increasing riskiness of the wholesale market will to some extent offset the benefits of lower capital costs and operational efficiencies if investors need to satisfy cautious debt coverage ratios alongside positive expected returns. This increased risk is additional to the well-known ‘merit order effect’ of low-carbon investments progressively depressing wholesale prices and hence their expected investment returns.

Policy relevance

Policy support for renewable technologies such as wind is usually based upon levelized costs and is expected to reduce over time as capital costs and operational efficiencies improve. However, levelized costs do not take full account of the risk aversion that investors may have in practice. Expected policy support reductions may be moderated to some extent by the increased financial performance risk that intermittent technologies bring to the power market. The annual risk-return profiles for incremental investments deteriorate for all technologies as wind replaces fossil fuels. This extra risk premium will need to be incorporated into evaluating policy incentives for new investments in a decarbonizing power market.  相似文献   

14.
《Climate Policy》2013,13(2):137-148
Abstract

Climate change equity debates tend to focus on achieving a fair and global ‘allocation’ of emission rights among countries. Allocation proposals typically envision, if implicitly, two purposes for international emissions trading. First, trading is expected to serve as a cost-effective means of promoting compliance with emissions targets. Second, trading is posited as a means to generate financial transfers, typically from industrialized to transitioning and developing countries.

This article investigates the common assumption that international emissions trading will effectively serve both of these purposes. We conclude that the two purposes might not be mutually supportive, and that efforts to use international emissions trading as a financial transfer mechanism may potentially undermine cost-effectiveness goals. International emissions trading on a global scale would create new risks in terms of both cost-effectiveness and environmental performance, some of which will be challenging to manage. In particular, uncertainties over market prices and trading eligibility, coupled with the costs of participation, may together be the Achilles heel of some allocation proposals that entail large financial transfers from industrialized to developing countries. Any proposal for an ‘equitable’ allocation of emission allowances, we conclude, must be cognizant of the risks and costs implied by a reliance on international emissions trading. We offer some suggestions to this end.  相似文献   

15.
《Climate Policy》2013,13(6):612-633
This article assesses the long-term economic and climatic effects of introducing price caps and price floors in hypothetical global climate change mitigation policy. Based on emission trends, abatement costs and equilibrium climate sensitivity from IPCC and IEA reports, this quantitative analysis confirms that price caps could significantly reduce economic uncertainty. This uncertainty stems primarily from unpredictable economic growth and energy prices, and ultimately unabated emission trends. In addition, the development of abatement technologies is uncertain. Furthermore, this analysis shows that rigid targets may entail greater economic risks with little or no comparative advantage for the climate. More ambitious emission objectives, combined with price caps and price floors, could still entail significantly lower expected costs while driving similar, or even slightly better, climatic outcomes in probabilistic terms.  相似文献   

16.
Alex Y. Lo 《Climate Policy》2016,16(1):109-124
China has introduced several pilot emission trading schemes to build the basis for a national scheme. The potential scale of this initiative raises prospects for a regional carbon trading network as a way to further engage other major Asian economies. However, the Chinese carbon markets rest upon a unique political-economic context and institutional environment that are likely to limit their development and viability. This article offers an overview of such structural economic and political constraints. Four main challenges are identified, namely, inadequate domestic demand, limited financial involvement, incomplete regulatory infrastructure, and excessive government intervention. The first two challenges concern economic dimensions and may be partially addressed by the incentives created by the newly introduced emission trading schemes. The other two are more deeply entrenched in the dominant political system and governing practice. They require fundamental changes to the ways in which the state and the market interact. The success of China's carbon market reform depends crucially on the ability of the ongoing efforts to transform the distorted state–market relationship.

Policy relevance

The burgeoning carbon markets offer opportunities for emissions mitigation at lower costs and enable circulation of a new form of capital, i.e. carbon credits, across borders. China accounts for a gigantic share of global GHG emissions and has the potential to significantly scale up these opportunities. There are clear implications for market developers and participants worldwide, including climate policy makers who attempt to link their emission trading schemes to other schemes, firms who seek to take advantage of the inexpensive carbon offsets generated in developing countries, international financial institutions who endeavour to establish their business in an emerging major carbon market, etc. This article can inform their decisions by identifying key issues that may undermine their ability to achieve these goals. Policy makers and stakeholders will benefit from this analysis, which shows how the Chinese carbon markets operate in ways that may be different from their experience elsewhere.  相似文献   


17.
Because of large economic and environmental asymmetries among world regions and the incentive to free ride, an international climate regime with broad participation is hard to reach. Most of the proposed regimes are based on an allocation of emissions rights that is perceived as fair. Yet, there are also arguments to focus more on the actual welfare implications of different regimes and to focus on a ‘fair’ distribution of resulting costs. In this article, the computable general equilibrium model DART is used to analyse the driving forces of welfare implications in different scenarios in line with the 2?°C target. These include two regimes that are often presumed to be ‘fair’, namely a harmonized international carbon tax and a cap and trade system based on the convergence of per capita emissions rights, and also an ‘equal loss’ scenario where welfare losses relative to a business-as-usual scenario are equal for all major world regions. The main finding is that indirect energy market effects are a major driver of welfare effects and that the ‘equal loss’ scenario would thus require large transfer payments to energy exporters to compensate for welfare losses from lower world energy demand and prices.

Policy relevance

A successful future climate regime requires ‘fair’ burden sharing. Many proposed regimes start from ethical considerations to derive an allocation of emissions reduction requirements or emissions allowances within an international emissions trading scheme. Yet, countries also consider the expected economic costs of a regime that are also driven by other factors besides allowance allocation. Indeed, in simplified lab experiments, successful groups are characterized by sharing costs proportional to wealth. This article shows that the major drivers of welfare effects are reduced demand for fossil energy and reduced fossil fuel prices, which implies that (1) what is often presumed to be a fair allocation of emissions allowances within an international emissions trading scheme leads to a very uneven distribution of economic costs and (2) aiming for equal relative losses for all regions requires large compensation to fossil fuel exporters, as argued, for example, by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).  相似文献   

18.
This paper analyzes the regional distribution of climate change mitigation costs in a global cap-and-trade regime. Four stylized burden-sharing rules are considered, ranging from GDP-based permit allocations to schemes that foresee a long-term convergence of per-capita emission permits. The comparison of results from three structurally different hybrid, integrated energy-economy models allows us to derive robust insights as well as identify sources of uncertainty with respect to the regional distribution of the costs of climate change mitigation. We find that regional costs of climate change mitigation may deviate substantially from the global mean. For all models, the mitigation cost average of the four scenarios is higher for China than for the other macro-regions considered. Furthermore, China suffers above-world-average mitigation costs for most burden-sharing rules in the long-term. A decomposition of mitigation costs into (a) primary (domestic) abatement costs and (b) permit trade effects, reveals that the large uncertainty about the future development of carbon prices results in substantial uncertainties about the financial transfers associated with carbon trade for a given allocation scheme. This variation also implies large uncertainty about the regional distribution of climate policy costs.  相似文献   

19.
Scholars have proposed that the Protection Motivation Theory provides a valuable framework to explain pro-environmental choices, by employing a wide set of predictors, such as the costs and benefits of current (maladaptive) behavior as well as prospective adaptive behavior. However, no comprehensive empirical tests of the Protection Motivation Theory in the slow onset environmental risk domain have been published yet to our knowledge. This paper aims at closing this gap. We first conceptualized the Protection Motivation Theory for the use in this environmental domain. Next, we present results of a questionnaire study among a large representative sample of Dutch drivers that showed that the Protection Motivation Theory is a relevant theory for modeling different indicators of full electric vehicle adoption. Notably, all theoretical antecedents proved to be significant predictors of different adoption indicators. Respondents were particularly more likely to adopt an electric vehicle when they perceived the negative consequences caused by conventional vehicles as more severe, and when they expected electric vehicles to decrease these consequences. The most important barriers for electric vehicle adoption were perceived high monetary and non-monetary costs of electric vehicles, and benefits associated with the use of a conventional vehicle. Interestingly, we found that environmental risks are more prominent in predicting close adoption indicators; while energy security risks are more prominent in predicting distant adoption indicators. As expected, our findings suggest that both collective concerns and individual concerns predict different indicators of adoption. Individual concerns (in particular perceived costs of driving an electric vehicle) played a more prominent role when predicting close measures of adoption, while collective concerns (e.g., perceived severity of environmental and energy security risks) played a somewhat more prominent role when predicting distant measures of adoption. Implications for research and practice are provided.  相似文献   

20.
Incentive measures can internalize the external benefits of ecosystem services or, conversely, the external costs of service losses. In the last decade, preliminary steps have been taken in this direction in the form of voluntary payments for ecosystem services. Much larger financial flows may be required, however, to reverse the present trend of ecosystem degradation, making the issue of distributive justice all the more pressing. This article offers a first outline of the international regulation of ecosystem services under different principles of distributive justice. It is concluded that negative incentives, i.e. putting a price on exerting pressures on ecosystems, are better justified than positive incentives, i.e. rewarding the provision of current ecosystem services. Negative incentives do not necessarily worsen the situation of countries, since the revenues of taxation are redistributed. Whether countries become net payers or receivers under a particular incentive and redistribution scheme depends upon its underlying principle of justice.  相似文献   

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