A CO2 tax assures that different fossil fuels are taxed in a neutral way according to actual CO2 emissions. The Swedish experience can be summarized by increased tax levels over time and steps taken towards a more uniform national price on fossil CO2. Moreover, the CO2 tax base is only moderately elastic to price changes (particularly in the short run) when it comes to petrol and diesel implying quite stable tax revenues.

So far Africa has benefited little from climate finance as compared to other continents with emerging economies. Climate projects are distributed unevenly across regions as well as among developing countries. This is partly due to lack of trained manpower in some of these countries and too restrictive criteria of most of the climate fund projects and programs that are designed to the disadvantage of Africa.

This Brief presents a framework that can be used to assess the potential impact of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) schemes.

Factors that determines the impact of PES are discussed such as additional forest conservation through targeted payments and the risk for unintended incentives and consequences and feelings of injustice among those who don´t receive payments. The brief further discuss the role for PES in national REDD+ policy.

How does uncertainty about “dangerous” climate change affect the prospects for international cooperation? Climate negotiations usually are depicted as a prisoners’ dilemma game; collectively, countries are better off reducing their emissions, but self-interest impels them to keep on emitting. We provide experimental evidence, grounded in an analytical framework, showing that the fear of crossing a dangerous threshold can turn climate negotiations into a coordination game, making collective action to avoid a dangerous threshold virtually assured.

We argue for integrating the consideration of location in policy planning in three ways, in order to help to predict policy impacts on deforestation and, thereby, improve policy choices.

Climate change is one of the main problems affecting the global environment which is critical to human welfare. Although the least developed countries (LDCs) in general and Africa in particular contribute the least to the problem, they are the most affected, with reasons varying from lacking resources to cope, immense poverty, and that many LDCs are located in regions where severe weather will hit the most.

Costa Rica has shown how a small developing country can reverse environmental degradation and one of the highest deforestation rates in Latin America. Key to its achievement has been the country’s PES programme, which began in 1997 and which many countries are now looking to learn from, especially as water markets and schemes to reward forest conservation and reduced deforestation (REDD+) grow.

In this paper, we explore the synergies and tradeoffs between abatement of global and local pollution. We built a unique dataset of Swedish heat and power plants with detailed boiler-level data 2001-2009 on not only production and inputs but also emissions of CO2 and NOx.

We study how uncertainty about climate change severity affects the relative benefits of early abatement and a portfolio of research and development (R&D) in lowering future abatement costs. Optimal early abatement depends on the curvature of the marginal benefit and marginal abatement cost (MAC) functions and how the uncertain parameter affects marginal benefits.

Stabilizing global greenhouse gas concentrations at levels to avoid significant climate risks will require massive ‘‘decarbonization’’ of all the major economies over the next few decades, in addition to the reduced emissions from other GHGs and carbon sequestration. Achieving the necessary scale of emissions reductions will require a multifaceted policy effort to support a broad array of technological and behavioral changes. Change on this scale will require sound, well-thought-out strategies.