International climate negotiations have specified that projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) should not lead to a "diversion" of official development assistance (ODA). It is however unchallenged that ODA can be used in capacity building for the CDM. Diversion can be interpreted in...

Afforestation and reforestation (AR) projects in the Clean Development Mechanism are able to create emission permits that can be accounted against the industrialized countries' commitments for limiting their greenhouse gas emissions, as agreed under the Kyoto Protocol. The discussion of how to...

The Milan conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has established two types of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), valid for afforestation and reforestation activities. In order to account for the non-permanent nature of carbon storage in forests,...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) removals by afforestation and reforestation project activities under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are vulnerable to a variety of risks and uncertainties, resulting in the partial or total reversal of such removals. Hence, GHG removals from these...

Joint Implementation (JI) is a potentially powerful instrument of climate policy that could lead to a high amount of additional financial flows to developing countries. Nevertheless, many NGOs and developing country representatives are very skeptical about JI and fear that it would not take into...

The implementation of activities aimed to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions is more cost-efficient in developing countries than in most of the industrialized world. Thus it has been a major, but contentious topic in the climate negotiations to allow crediting of emissions reduction in...

The authors suggest a multi-layered system of three convergence criteria - similar to those used in the run-up to the European monetary union - that define the notion of "demonstrable progress" towards reaching the emission commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. These are the existence of an...

This paper attempts to show how WTO negotiations on liberalisation of environmental goods and services can have a negative or positive impact on the international climate change policy depending on the outcome of the Doha Mandate paragraph 31 debates. Certainly there has been no significant...

A whole bundle of so-called "flexible mechanisms" has been foreseen by the Kyoto Protocol in order to help industrial countries to fulfill their agreed reduction targets in the most cost-effective way. Emission permits will act as the backbone of all market-orientated mechanisms. Therefore,...

Carbon sequestration projects in the context of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) suffer from the stigma of permanence risk. The risk that carbon reduced or sequestered in forestry projects is release further down the road is in fact undeniable, whoever bears the onus. The merit of the...