Abstract
The term ‘climate policy’ covers both policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (called mitigation) and policies to adapt to climate change (adaptation). Current literature on climate policy assessment essentially consists of ex ante assessments of mitigation policies, using more or less sophisticated economic models. Adaptation studies, while still very much in the minority, are becoming more frequent. The growing number of climate policies being implemented in different countries throughout the world should lead to a proliferation of ex post assessments in the coming years.
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Notes
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When the difference between benefits and costs can be measured, a subsidiary issue is the search for the ‘best’ climate policy options, that is, those that maximize that difference.
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The way in which the climate will change in a given emissions scenario remains uncertain—the more so the lower we go in the geographic scale. Also, the way the major biogeophysical cycles (the water cycle, for example) and ecosystems respond to climate change is still poorly known. And lastly, the impact the changes will have on societies will depend on their lifestyles, their wealth, their knowledge, etc. All of these parameters are difficult to predict in the long term.
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In particular the presence or absence of non-linearities (Ambrosi et al. 2003).
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Part of the debate centres on the relative weight to be assigned, in economic calculations, to future cash flows relative to present cash flows, a parameter called the ‘discount rate’ (see e.g. Heal 2009).
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I.e., first- or second-generation fuels coupled with sequestration of CO2 emissions from combustion.
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If the policy reduces emissions of gases other than CO2, a conventional ‘exchange rate’ is used (the global warming potential of the gas over 100 years according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to express the reduction as tonnes CO2 equivalent (denoted t CO2-eq). For example, emission of 1 t of methane ‘equals’ 23 t of CO2.
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Techno-economic models have often been termed more ‘optimistic’ in that they produce emission reduction costs that are lower than in macroeconomic models. Ongoing research is trying to reduce the disparity between the two families of models, in particular by producing so-called ‘hybrid’ models that contain a general representation of the economy, but retain a somewhat detailed representation of the technical system and less-than-totally-smooth functioning of the economy (Hourcade et al. 2006).
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Moreover, mitigation and adaptation are often linked, for example in the field of agriculture and forestry.
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Lecocq, F. (2016). Climate Policy Assessment on Global and National Scales. In: Torquebiau, E. (eds) Climate Change and Agriculture Worldwide. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7462-8_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7462-8_23
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