China had been singled out by Western politicians and media for dragging its feet on international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the accusations previously always targeted on the U.S. To put such a criticism into perspective, this paper provides some reflections on China's stance and...

China has realized that for its own sake and from the international community’s perspective, it cannot afford to continue along the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. Accordingly, the country has placed ecological goals at the same level of...

We describe three essential elements of an effective post-2012 international global climate policy architecture: a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; an emphasis on an extended time path of targets; and inclusion of...

Carbon budgets have emerged as a robust metric of warming, but little is known about the usefulness of regional carbon budgets as indicators of policy. This article explores the potential of regional carbon budgets to inform climate policy. Using the large database of scenarios from IPCC AR5...

The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP), an initiative of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), aims to demonstrate how countries can transform their energy systems by 2050 in order to...

Our purpose is to analyse the effectiveness and efficiency of a Partial Climate Agreement with open entry under a non-cooperative Nash-Equilibrium framework. We evaluate a partial agreement policy in which non-signatory countries can decide to join or to leave a coalition of the willing at any...

With the long term goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C and "to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C", the Paris Agreement puts renewed attention on the portfolio of technologies needed to achieve consistent emission reductions...