Back to Search
Start Over
Climate agreements and India: aligning options and opportunities on a new track
- Source :
- International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. 11:229-243
- Publication Year :
- 2011
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2011.
-
Abstract
- The Climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 witnessed the emerging power of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China (BASIC). Although still focussed on domestic development goals, BASIC countries have made important steps toward a greater engagement in the global climate agenda. For India, the shift was marked by a voluntary, but conditional, target of reducing emission intensity, away from the past normative position based on “equal per capita,” emissions entitlements. The new track aims at finding cost-effective mitigation strategies that align national development goals and climate actions. This paper examines the mitigation potential of a domestic sustainable development policy using a suite of integrated assessment models. The long-term goal is to keep temperature increase below 2°C. This article shows that it is possible to match domestic development goals and climate mitigation. Win–win options exist and side benefits—in terms of energy security and local pollution—are important. However, development policies are not sufficient to achieve the desired emissions reductions. We find that it is necessary to introduce a constraint on the carbon budget. The price of carbon that emerges is however much lower than in a conventional mitigation scenario. Finally, this paper proposes to shift the negotiations away from the current climate-centric focus toward “development,” in order to reduce conflicts and deliver greater global and national benefits.
- Subjects :
- Sustainable development
Economics and Econometrics
Natural resource economics
business.industry
media_common.quotation_subject
Environmental resource management
Energy security
Emission intensity
Negotiation
Order (exchange)
Political Science and International Relations
Per capita
Economics
Position (finance)
business
Law
Constraint (mathematics)
media_common
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15731553 and 15679764
- Volume :
- 11
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........d5084bbfc196f6c07970368b3c1261dd