In permit trading systems, free initial allocation is common practice. A recent example is the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). We investigate effects of different free allocation schemes on incentives and identify significant perverse effects on abatement and...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) should foster sustainable development and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The design of the CDM and first experience suggest that it may not achieve these goals. Developing countries hosting CDM projects may loose cheap emissions reduction possibilities...

There is a danger that the CDM will fail to live up to its goals, namely reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and enhanced sustainable development. Sustainability labeling is a promising strategy to hedge against such failures. Labels could also serve as a business risk-hedging tool. The...

Organic agriculture as an adaptation strategy to climate change and variability is a concrete and promising option for adaptation in rural communities. Organic agriculture has additional potential as a mitigation strategy. This text is a short review article on this topic. Adaptation and...

I show how the problems with zero and negative values in decomposition can in principle be resolved by avoiding ill-defined mathematical operations used to derive the decomposition formulae (division by zero and taking logarithms of zero and negative values). Referring to integral approximation,...

Modern bioenergy is seen as a promising option to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There is, however, a potential competition for land and water between bioenergy and food crops. Another question is whether biomass for energy use can be produced in a sustainable manner given the current...

I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which is the foundation of decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, clarifies their often...

This study undertakes a decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of carbon emissions change in the Swedish business and industry sectors 1993 - 2006. On aggregate, energy intensity decreased, but this does not seem to have been very important for reducing emissions. Rather, fuel...

Complementing market-based policy instruments with conflict analysis approaches provides a wider understanding of market situations and allows to identify minimal requirements regarding needs, power and conflict dynamics. If these are not met, a market cannot be successfully introduced or a...

We analyse CO2 emissions reduction costs based on project data from the Climate Cent Foundation (CCF), a climate policy instrument in Switzerland. We draw four conclusions. First, for the projects investigated, the CCF on average pays € 63/t. Due to the Kyoto Protocol, the CCF buys reductions...