Search

In view of the climate emergency, it is necessary to model and forecast road transport emissions for implementing more effective climate policy. This paper fills an important research gap by quantifying the challenges, barriers and remedies of achieving road transport emission reduction and air quality improvement in developing countries. It contributes to the debate on top-down and bottom-up approaches to reconcile carbon and other transport related emissions. China and India are chosen as case studies. Using various official statistics and proxy variables, we estimate and compare the road transport carbon emissions of the two countries systematically from 2009 to 2020. Insights from detailed mode-specific estimations of the bottom-up approach are valuable for targeted policies and measures. An analysis of the major components of road transport carbon emissions points to strategies of promoting electric vehicles, reducing transport demand, accelerating modal shift to low-carbon modes, and cleaner electricity to achieve climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Developed countries have relied heavily on aid budgets to fulfill their pledges to boost funding for addressing climate change in developing countries. However, little is known about how interaction between aid and other ministries has shaped contributors’ diverse approaches to climate finance. This paper investigates intra-governmental dynamics in decision-making on climate finance in seven contributor countries (Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the UK, and the US). While aid agencies retained considerable control over implementation, environment and finance ministries have played an influential and often contrasting role on key policy issues, including distribution between mitigation and adaptation and among geographical regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government support in the form of so-called feed-in tariff policies (FITs), which combine long-term, fixed-price electricity purchase agreements and guaranteed grid-access, has attracted large private-sector investments in sustainable electricity generation in the industrialized world. In an effort to replicate these experiences globally, a number of international organizations, NGOs, banks and donor countries are proposing mechanisms to cover part of the cost of FITs in developing countries. This paper reviews these proposals for supported FITs and then uses a case study of Thailand’s Alternative Energy Development Plan 2013–2021 to investigate the opportunities and challenges of supporting FITs at a global scale. The review highlights that these proposed mechanisms foresee different roles for national governments and supporting entities, particularly in terms of who is responsible to balance fixed FIT payments with uncertain revenues and savings from carbon markets, donors and avoided fuel consumption. The case study results then show that the uncertainty about the actual cost of supported FITs is so significant that the responsibility to balance the FIT budget has to be considered carefully in the design of any mechanism that is to be employed at scale. To a considerable extent, the uncertainty is driven by the counterfactual analysis, i.e., by assumptions about the future savings from avoided fossil fuel consumption: for example, depending on the fossil fuel price scenario the FIT may result in a cost of USD 17bn or savings of 23bn. Unlike uncertainty about the necessary level of FIT payments, uncertainty about the avoided fossil fuel cost materializes only over the course of the policy’s lifetime, making it politically challenging. This suggests that an international support mechanism that differentiates the allocation of responsibility depending on the income-level of the recipient country is more suitable for global-scale support than a one-size-fits-all approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]