Mitigation and adaptation are the most important strategies in combating global climate change. It is expected that in a post Kyoto world industrialized countries have to engage in greenhouse gas abatement, and to support developing countries in adapting to climate change. Within the framework...

Previous research shows that collective action to avoid a catastrophic threshold, such as a climate “tipping point,” is unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of crossing the threshold but that collective action collapses if the location of the threshold is uncertain. Theory suggests...

This paper argues that a uniform global tax-like price on carbon emissions, whose revenues each country retains, can provide a focal point for a reciprocal common climate commitment, whereas quantity targets, which do not nearly so readily present such a single focal point, tend to rely...

According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, global collective action is needed to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous [our emphasis] anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The Framework Convention thus...

We propose a theory of climate-policy motivated foreign intervention to study different forms of international climate governance in the presence of power imbalance. Foreign countries have at least three options to intervene in another country's domestic climate policy: i.) Agreements with...

This paper analyses the incentives to participate in and the stability of international climate coalitions. Using the integrated assessment model WITCH, the analysis of coalitions' profitability and stability is performed under alternative assumptions concerning the pure rate of time preference,...

In this paper we argue that when a subgroup of countries cooperate on emission reduction, the optimal response of non-signatory countries reflects the interaction between three potentially opposing factors, the incentive to free-ride on the benefits of cooperation, the incentive to expand the...

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...

It is well established that adaptation and technological investment in each case may serve as a commitment device in international climate politics. This paper for the first time analyzes the combined impact of these two strategic variables on global mitigation within a noncooperative framework...

We study international free-riding-proof coalitions to solve trans-boundary environmental problems such as global warming. We show that the free-riding problem is rather serious so that a free-riding-proof coalition can consist of only a small number of countries. In the optimal coalitional...