The EU has long assumed leadership in advancing domestic and international climate change policy. While pushing its partners in international negotiations, it has led the way in implementing a host of domestic measures, including a unilateral and legally binding target, an ambitious policy on renewable energy and a strategy for low-carbon technology deployment. The centrepiece of EU policy, however, has been the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), a cap-and-trade programme launched in 2005.

Adaptation to climate change in southern and eastern Mediterranean countries is particularly relevant because of the strong expected effects on the region and the sensitivity of important sectors like agriculture and tourism to climate change. This work analyses qualitative scenarios with the support of insights from the theoretical literature and information collected from case studies about Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey. We deal with several dimensions of adaptation, including the role of the government, equity, uncertainty and linkages with mitigation.

This paper establishes and measures key biodiversity and ecosystem health indicators and the number of world heritage sites in coastal areas at global level. It then estimates – econometrically – the indicators’ influence on the provision of tourism values through the marine ecosystem function as a harbour of biodiversity, and as a provider of amenity values and marine cultural identity. The report then focuses on the MEDPRO region, providing some estimates of the potential impact of climate change on these services for a given temperature increase scenario.

In July 2012, the European Commission issued an invitation for public consultation to review the ‘auctioning time profile’ for the EU Emissions Trading Scheme” in order to collect views from stakeholders and experts in the field of the EU carbon market on a draft for a future amendment of the Commission Regulation on the timing, administration and other aspects of auctioning of greenhouse gas emission allowances. In this submission, the CEPS Carbon Market Forum addresses the following questions and offers its views on the Commission’s proposed amendments:

In recognition that the world is moving towards a new climate change regime that in many ways will be very different from the world in which the Kyoto Protocol has been operating, climate negotiators and other specialists have begun to focus their attention on developing a “framework for variable approaches” (FVA). It is hoped that this new framework will prove more adaptable to national circumstances and more capable of catalysing new ideas, at the regional, national or sub-national level.

In 2009, President Obama pledged that, by 2020, the United States would achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of 17% from 2005 levels. With the failure of Congress to adopt comprehensive climate legislation in 2010, the feasibility of the pledge was put in doubt. However, we find that the United States is near to reaching this goal: the country is currently on course to achieve reductions of 16.3% from 2005 levels in 2020.

To date, Southern Mediterranean countries have hosted a limited number of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). There are three challenges to the participation of middle-income countries in future carbon markets: the limited size of future demand for offsets or credits; restrictions on the use of CDM credits in Phase III of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme; and the lack of prompt preparation for the start of new market-based mechanisms. This study examines existing and emerging activities in Southern Mediterranean countries that could fit into new market-based mechanisms.

From 2006 to 2011, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) provided a non-legally binding framework based on a public-private partnership to support projects towards clean development and climate objectives in seven countries in the region. The seven partner countries concluded that the APP activities were successful and could lead to other successes in similar initiatives with similar working formats.

This Policy Brief summarises the emerging regulations at the national level in the US, and offers an assessment of potential emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act. It also describes the efforts at the subnational level, and the interaction of these policies with the Clean Air Act under the particular structure of so-called ‘environmental federalism’. This structure places central responsibility for implementation of regulations at the state level, making the architecture of existing state-level policies increasingly relevant and influential.

Space-based observation can provide vital data about the impact of climate change, as well as serve as an essential tool for monitoring the progress of actions implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This space-based research can support EU policy on climate change, both domestically and internationally.

With the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) now entering in its seventh year of operation, this report takes stock of the largest multi-sector greenhouse gas trading scheme in the world. It reviews the experiences of the pilot phase from 2005-07, assesses the adjustments introduced in the second phase (2008-12) and looks ahead to the radical changes that will come into effect in the third phase starting in 2013. The assessment is based on a literature review of recently published ex-post analyses and ex-ante studies and draws as well on our own calculations.

This paper gives an assessment of the state of the finance negotiations under the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UN climate change conference in the Chinese town of Tianjin (2-9 October 2010) was the final preparatory UN meeting for the 16th annual UN Conference of Parties (COP-16) held in Cancún, Mexico in December 2010. The aim of this paper is to assess how the momentum achieved in Tianjin can be harnessed to deliver the sort of outcomes required for a comprehensive deal.

Among the many unresolved issues on the agenda of the forthcoming UN climate change negotiations in Cancún is the issue of what will happen to the Kyoto Protocol, since at present, there will be no targets for greenhouse (GHG) emissions from developed countries under the Protocol beyond 2012. To illuminate this aspect of the Protocol, this Policy Brief looks closer at the nature of the commitments and the compliance regime under the Kyoto Protocol. We argue that the compliance regime of the Protocol is not as robust as many of the Protocol’s supporters might think.

Any strategy by the EU towards making a meaningful contribution to the global effort of reducing GHG emissions needs to address the core of the problem: ‘coal’, or, more accurately, abundant coal. The failure in the United States, a rich economy with only a moderate dependency on coal, to introduce even a moderate carbon tax, means that it certain that no commitment will be forthcoming for the next generation from China, which is still much poorer and depends even more heavily on indigenous coal (and produces twice as much as the US).