A unilateral carbon tax trades off the distortionary costs of taxation and the future gains from slowing down global warming. Because the cost is local and immediate, whereas the benefit is global and delayed, this tradeoff tends to be unfavorable to unilateral carbon taxes. We show that this...

The standard approach to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) holds that as a country develops and GDP per capita grows environmental degradation initially increases but eventually it reaches a turning point where environmental degradation begins to decline. Environmental degradation takes many...

The standard approach to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) holds that as a country develops and GDP per capita grows environmental degradation initially increases but eventually it reaches a turning point where environmental degradation begins to decline. Environmental degradation takes many...

Mountainous areas are at the forefront of climate change. This working paper presents approaches to strengthening the resilience of human and natural systems in mountainous areas against the impacts of climate change. Chapter 1 provides an overview of climate-related hazards to ecosystems and...

Ensuring that climate finance is used effectively will help to maximise its impact. The effectiveness of climate finance can be defined as the extent to which an activity attains its stated aims. These aims can vary, depending on the source of climate finance and how it is channelled. There are...

Shifting public and private investment from “brown” to “green” is an essential part of climate change. The post-2020 climate agreement to be agreed at COP 21 in December 2015 has the potential to play a significant role in signalling the importance of such a shift. This paper explores...

A new international climate change agreement that will have legal force and be applicable to all countries is being negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The agreement is to be adopted by 2015 and come into effect from 2020. An...

The aim of this paper is to explore what a flexible and durable 2015 climate change agreement could look like and propose pragmatic options for the design of such an agreement. A durable 2015 climate change agreement would continue to be ambitious, fair and effective in 2020 and beyond. An...

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. We exploit natural variability in global temperature and rely on time-series variation. A 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world GDP. Global...

Climate change is a phenomenon beset with major uncertainties and researchers should include them in Integrated Assessment Models. However, including further dimensions in IAM models comes at a cost. In particular, it makes most of these models suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this...