Obesity has become a serious public health problem in both industrialized and rapidly industrializing countries. It increases greenhouse gas emissions through higher fuel needs for transportation of heavier people, lifecycle emissions from additional food production and methane emissions from...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) so far has failed to mobilize a substantial amount of energy efficiency projects; less than 4% of credits come from this category. This is due to the fact that only few methodologies for setting of baselines and monitoring project emissions have been...

The Kyoto Protocol sets legally binding emission targets for industrialised countries without accounting for reductions carried out prior to 2008, the beginning of the first commitment period. There exists only one exception, the project-based Clean Development Mechanism where credits accrue...

The impacts of global warming threaten to undermine the core objectives of sustainable development: Large-scale invest¬ments that aim to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) are indispensable. A just low-carbon transformation requires that mitigation investments seek to generate sustainable...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was originally seen as an instrument with a bilateral character where an entity from an industrialised country invests in a project in a developing country (DC). Also, multilateral funds were envisaged that would bundle investments to spread project risks....

The countries wishing to join the EU have a high potential for low cost greenhouse gas emission reduction. As they cannot join the "bubble" agreement for the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, project-based Joint Implementation (JI) could be a powerful strategy to integrate accession...

Transaction costs will reduce the attractiveness of the Kyoto Mechanisms compared to domestic abatement options. Especially the project-based mechanisms CDM and JI are likely to entail considerable costs of baseline development, verification and certification. The AIJ pilot phase and the PCF...

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...

China has had an enormous growth of energy and electricity consumption during the last decades. This has been fuelled primarily by using domestic coal resources. Until 1997, annual construction of power stations averaged around 15 GW which was not sufficient to alleviate the demand surplus....