The Carbon Market Challenge


Book Description

Carbon markets – both emission trading systems and baseline and credit systems – are an increasingly common policy instrument being introduced to address climate change mitigation. However, their design is crucial to ensure that they deliver cost-effective emission reductions while maintaining environmental integrity. This Element puts together a comprehensive, principle-based overview of the risks and abuses to environmental integrity and cost effectiveness that have emerged for carbon markets at all jurisdictional levels around the world, provides concrete examples, and offers effective policy and governance solutions to overcome such risks. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.




Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism


Book Description

The promise of harnessing market forces to combat climate change has been unsettled by low carbon prices, financial losses, and ongoing controversies in global carbon markets. And yet governments around the world remain committed to market-based solutions to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. This book discusses what went wrong with the marketisation of climate change and what this means for the future of action on climate change. The book explores the co-production of capitalism and climate change by developing new understandings of relationships between the appropriation, commodification and capitalisation of nature. The book reveals contradictions in carbon markets for addressing climate change as a socio-ecological, economic and political crisis, and points towards more targeted and democratic policies to combat climate change. This book will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers and campaigners who are interested in climate change and climate policy, and the political economy of capitalism and the environment.




The Carbon Challenge


Book Description

Facing the threat of climate change, the world community has to meet a major challenge: how to limit global emissions at the least possible cost to the welfare of this and future generations. But actual policy implementation throughout the OECD has been slowed by entrenched opposition from emission-intensive sectors of the economy - reducing emissions produces losers as well as winners, and hard choices have to be made. This book charts New Zealand climate-change policy since 1990, focusing on the interface between technical effectiveness and political sustainability. The message is optimistic: New Zealand can make the changes required by Kyoto, at acceptable cost, if political leadership is exercised firmly and impartially.




Carbon Markets


Book Description

This book explores the microstructure of carbon markets and the pricing of carbon financial instruments generally. It provides a critical microstructure analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), and also examines the theoretical and related market design issues affecting emissions trading schemes. Individual chapters analyse how intraday pricing evolves in carbon markets, the price impact of block trades in carbon financial instruments and their determinants, short and long-term liquidity effects in carbon markets, and the links between carbon market liquidity and efficiency. The aforementioned issues are explored using case studies of two major trading platforms operating within the EU-ETS. The book concludes by focusing on future policy and regulatory challenges in carbon markets, especially with respect to addressing pricing volatility challenges.




Country Perspectives


Book Description

The Paris Agreement, with its universal requirement on all countries to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs), marks a significant change for the framework of international cooperation through carbon markets. With all countries committing themselves to climate action to reduce emissions and achieve their NDCs, the ability to exert exclusive claims over the emission impact from carbon market investments and count them towards emission targets is becoming increasingly complicated. This study seeks to understand perspectives of potential host countries on the role international voluntary carbon markets might play in the context of their NDCs and the Paris Agreement. In doing so, it explores emerging issues and challenges these markets may face and clarifies key aspects host country governments may need to consider in relation to their market participation. The study takes voluntary carbon markets to refer to carbon market transactions that are undertaken by entities on a voluntary basis and not as a result of any policy-related regulatory requirements. Recent years have already seen traditional distinctions between voluntary and regulatory markets break down as standards bodies and the push for environmental and social co-benefits begin to cross the old boundaries. And increasingly, companies are adopting net-zero emission targets, which has been accompanied by a surge of interest and investment in the voluntary carbon market. Indications are that voluntary action and voluntary demand for credits is on an upward trajectory and expected to witness substantial growth in the coming years. A greater understanding of host countries' roles in international voluntary carbon markets, aligned with the Paris Agreement, will help to build on this momentum.




Carbon Markets


Book Description

Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles of 2010 award. This book is a comprehensive and accessible guide to understanding the opportunities offered by regulated and voluntary carbon markets for tackling climate change. Coverage includes: - An overview of the problem of climate change, with a concise review of the most recent scientific evidence in different fields - A highly accessible introduction to the economic theory and different constitutive elements of a carbon allowances market - Explanation of the Kyoto Protocol and its flexibility mechanisms - Explanation of how the EU Emissions Trading Scheme works in practice - Ongoing developments in regulated carbon markets in the US - Up-to-the-minute coverage of regulated carbon markets in Australia - Developments in New Zealand and Japan - Carbon offsetting and voluntary carbon markets. Combining theoretical aspects with practical applications, this book is for business leaders, financiers, carbon traders, lawyers, bankers, researchers, policy makers and anyone interested in market mechanisms to mitigate climate change. The carbon emissions resulting from the production of this book have been calculated, reduced and offset to render the bookcarbon neutral. Published with CO2 Neutral




Demand in a Fragmented Global Carbon Market


Book Description

The global carbon market currently faces a deep demand crisis. The consequent price fall reduces the incentive to make low-carbon investments and thus increases the risk of locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure. The global carbon market relies on ambitious climate policy and consists of a mosaic of different schemes. Despite the current lack of ambitious global climate policy, various market-based approaches are emerging around the world, indicating increasing scope and fragmentation of the carbon markets. This report, conducted by GreenStream together with Climate Focus, analyses the status and outlook of global carbon markets and identifies measures and circumstances how new demand for carbon credits could be created to strengthen global efforts to limit the global average temperature rise to 2êC, taking into account the trend towards fragmentation of carbon markets.




Carbon


Book Description

Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done? In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.




Making Climate Policy Work


Book Description

For decades, the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but the most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis – the use of market-based programs – hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale. Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy – government-led strategies – to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.




Carbon Finance


Book Description

Praise for Carbon Finance "A timely, objective, and informative analysis of the financial opportunities and challenges presented by climate change, including a thorough description of adaptive measures and insurance products for managing risk in a carbon constrained economy." —James R. Evans, M. Eng. P. Geo., Senior Manager, Environmental Risk Management, RBC Financial Group "Climate change will have enormous financial implications in the years to come. How businesses and investors respond to the risks and opportunities from this issue will have an enormous rippling effect in the global economy. Sonia Labatt and Rodney White's insights and thoughtful analysis should be read by all who want to successfully navigate this global business issue." —Andrea Moffat, Director, Corporate Programs, Ceres "In Carbon Finance, Labatt and White present a clear and accessible description of the climate change debate and the carbon market that is developing. Climate change is becoming an important factor for many financial sector participants. The authors illustrate how challenges and opportunities will arise within the carbon market for banking, insurance, and investment activities as well as for the regulated and energy sector of the economy." —Charles E. Kennedy, Director and Portfolio Manager, MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier Inc. "Climate change is the greatest environmental challenge of our generation. Its impact on the energy sector has implications for productivity and competitiveness. At the same time, environmental risk has emerged as a major challenge for corporations in the age of full disclosure. Carbon Finance explains how these disparate forces have spawned a range of financial products designed to help manage the inherent risk. It is necessary reading for corporate executives facing challenges that are unique in their business experience." —Skip Willis, Managing Director Canadian Operations, ICF International "In this timely publication, Labatt and White succeed in communicating the workings of carbon markets, providing simple examples and invaluable context to the new and changing mechanisms that underpin our transformation to a carbon-constrained world. Carbon Finance will be the definitive guide to this field for years to come." —Susan McGeachie, Director, Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Graduate Faculty Member, University of Toronto; and Jane Ambachtsheer, Principal, Mercer Investment Consulting, Graduate Faculty Member, University of Toronto