ECN: Sharing of commitments
International Energy and Climate Policy - International Climate Policy - Kyoto Mechanisms
Sharing of mitigation commitments
How to share among nations the global GHG emission reductions needed to meet the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC and related costs to meet these reductions? ECN has developed a model to address this question: the Multi-Sector Convergence approach.
The cost of climate mitigation commitments is a very important consideration for climate change negotiators (beside other issues such as equity). For countries that have already implemented many measures, further reduction will become increasingly expensive. For countries with a fossil-fuel-intensive transport and energy-supply infrastructure, a shift to a less fossil-fuel-intensive infrastructure might be quite costly.
The same holds for countries with a low renewable energy potential, and/or for countries that have decided not to 'go (more) nuclear'. Furthermore, the risk of 'carbon leakage' (shifting of carbon-intensive economic activities to countries with more lenient emissions policies) is an important consideration.
These and quite some other issues should be taken into account in the design of burden-sharing rules.
Over the past 15 years, ECN gained extensive experience in burden sharing issues. Already in the preliminary stages of the UNFCCC/CoP-3 conference in Kyoto several quantitative studies were conducted to inform the participants in the negotiation process.
ECN and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) in Oslo have carried out a 2-years research project on the Burden Sharing issue. The aim of this project was to identify the most promising rules applicable for differentiation of GHG emission reduction targets among countries. One of the outputs of the project is the Multi-Sector Convergence (MSC) framework approach to derive a global set of differentiated national GHG emission targets. The MSC approach can be used as an input for negotiations on new commitments to reduce GHG emissions for time periods beyond 2012, the closing year of the budget period defined by of the Kyoto Protocol. An interactive MSC tool (zip file 9 MB) has been designed, which can be downloaded as well as the manual (pdf 136 kB).
Other MSC publications are available.
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For more information please contact: Jaap Jansen or Jos Sijm
