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Vulnerability is an emerging concept for climate science and policy. Over the past decade, efforts to assess vulnerability to climate change triggered a process of theory development and assessment practice, which is reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper reviews the historical development of the conceptual ideas underpinning assessments of vulnerability to climate change. We distinguish climate impact assessment, first- and second-generation vulnerability assessment, and adaptation policy assessment. The different generations of assessments are described by means of a conceptual framework that defines key concepts of the assessment and their analytical relationships. The purpose of this conceptual framework is two-fold: first, to present a consistent visual glossary of the main concepts underlying the IPCC approach to vulnerability and its assessment; second, to show the evolution of vulnerability assessments. This evolution is characterized by the progressive inclusion of non-climatic determinants of vulnerability to climate change, including adaptive capacity, and the shift from estimating expected damages to attempting to reduce them. We hope that this paper improves the understanding of the main approaches to climate change vulnerability assessment and their evolution, not only within the climate change community but also among researchers from other scientific communities, who are sometimes puzzled by the unfamiliar use of technical terms in the context of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manifold linkages exist between climate change and sustainable development. Although these are starting to receive attention in the climate exchange literature, the focus has typically been on examining sustainable development through a climate change lens, rather than vice versa. And there has been little systematic examination of how these linkages may be fostered in practice. This paper examines climate change through a sustainable development lens. To illustrate how this might change the approach to climate change issues, it reports on the findings of a panel of business, local government, and academic representatives in British Columbia, Canada, who were appointed to advise the provincial government on climate change policy. The panel found that sustainable development may offer a significantly more fruitful way to pursue climate policy goals than climate policy itself. The paper discusses subsequent climate change developments in the province and makes suggestions as how best to pursue such a sustainability approach in British Columbia and other jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent environmental issues such as global warming and illegal dumping of waste, people are getting more concerned with the impacts of household activities on the environment. Environmental conservation activities conducted voluntarily by citizens may reduce these impacts. Citizens can be encouraged by the assessment of their activities for further undertakings. In this article, as necessary tools for such assessment, new statistics measuring the size of citizens’ activities in the environmental conservation are presented along with the outline of environmental governance in Japan. In concluding, several strategies for effective involvement of citizens in the environmental governance are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract??We analyze important forces that hamper the formation of successful self-enforcing agreements to mitigate global warming from an economic point of view. The analysis combines two modules: (a) an integrated assessment model that captures the feedback between the economy, environmental damages and the climate system and (b) a game theoretic model that determines stable coalitions in the presence of free-riding incentives. We consider two types of measures to enhance the success of international environmental treaty-making: (a) transfers, aiming at balancing asymmetric gains from cooperation; (b) institutional changes, aiming at making it more difficult to upset stability of a treaty. We find that institutional changes may be as important as transfers and should therefore receive more attention in future international negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States and China are responsible for nearly 40 per cent of total annual greenhouse gas emissions. Global climatic stabilization cannot succeed without the participation of people and organizations in the PRC and the USA. Given the likelihood of continued political paralysis at the national level in both countries, it is important to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential of nongovernmental actors in bringing about durable reductions in GHG emissions. Consumption trajectories present one of the most intractable barriers to anthropogenic GHG-emissions reductions and to long-term climatic stabilization. Nordlund and Garvill's (2003) model is adapted and applied in assessing prospects for value change, specific problem awareness, and sustainable-consumption behavior in the PRC and USA. The contributions of nonstate actors are elucidated when issue bundling (specifically links with stress reduction and healthy futures) and principle bundling are incorporated into the explanatory framework. The involvement of transnationally competent activists in emissions mitigation projects, value change, and durable sustainable-consumption practices provides a beacon for future possibilities. Chinese transnationals are a key overlooked and underestimated piece in the current emissions-reduction puzzle because of their critical position at the intersection of values, behavior change, and nongovernmental institutions directly and indirectly involved in climatic-change mitigation. Given their special U.S./P.R.C. leverage, other actors concerned with building a sustainable-consumption movement and with climatic stabilization are likely to benefit from devoting increased attention and responsibilities to this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been shown that preparedness to respond effectively to imminent abrupt climate change, getting CO2 levels down towards pre-industrial in a few decades, involves the promotion of specific technology types that can be the basis for a negative emissions energy system (Read and Lermit 2003/5). In particular, Bio-Energy technologies linked to technologies for CO2 Capture and Storage (BECS) or to other carbon disposal technologies, if done on a sufficiently large scale, can achieve this result given a context of policy urgency that also yields advances in energy efficiency and the take up of ambient energy technologies (wind, solar, etc.) in line with low emissions energy scenarios (e.g. the fossil free energy scenario developed by the Tellus Institute for Greenpeace International (Lazarus et al. 1993). It has also been shown (Read 1999, 2000, 2000a) that, if account is taken of inter-temporal beneficial learning externalities, it is efficient to reward innovation in policy-desirable technology types (e.g. through project-based schemes that embody such technology types) by a greater amount than the penalty on emissions. Such dynamic efficiency can be achieved through establishing a secondary market for project based credits exchanged for a number of emissions permits M(t) (M > 1 for t < H, the time horizon for policy) and with the variation of M(t) over time corresponding to the dynamically efficient path. This results in the incentive for project based emissions reductions being M(t) times greater than the penalty on emissions. By making use of the initial allocation of permits in each time period, an aspect of emissions permit trading that has no efficiency function under either auctioning or `grand-fathering', this arrangement enables project based credits to be administered flexibly whilst ensuring the integrity of the emissions cap. The purpose of this article is to link these two bodies of work to show how a dynamically efficient response to the threat of abrupt climate change can be implemented in a way that is compatible with the response to gradual climate change that has been negotiated in the Kyoto Protocol. The design of such a dynamically efficient mechanism is considered, having as its objective the promotion of the two technology types mentioned above. A particular institutional model for implementing such a mechanism is described that mimics managerial behaviour in the adoption of new technology, avoids the additionality requirement that burdens the operation of the CDM in its current form, and aims to achieve `industry friendliness' as a necessary condition of effective implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]