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The "South-North Dialogue" Proposal, developed by researchers from developing and industrialised countries, outlined equitable approaches to mitigation. These approaches were based on the criteria of responsibility, capability and potential to mitigate, and include deep cuts in industrialised (Annex I) countries and differentiated mitigation commitments for developing countries. This paper quantitatively analyses the implications of the proposal for countries' emissions and costs. The analysis focuses on a "political willingness" scenario and four stabilisation scenarios. The analysis shows that stringent stabilisation targets imply that many developing countries would have to take on quantitative mitigation obligations by 2030, even when the Annex I countries take on ambitious mitigation commitments far beyond the Kyoto obligations. The "political willingness scenario" will probably not suffice to limit a warming of the Earth's atmosphere to below 2 °C.
For the option of “carbon capture and storage”, an integrated assessment in the form of a life cycle analysis and a cost assessment combined with a systematic comparison with renewable energies regarding future conditions in the power plant market for the situation in Germany is done. The calculations along the whole process chain show that CCS technologies emit per kWh more than generally assumed in clean-coal concepts (total CO2 reduction by 72-90% and total greenhouse gas reduction by 65-79%) and considerable more if compared with renewable electricity. Nevertheless, CCS could lead to a significant absolute reduction of GHG-emissions within the electricity supply system. Furthermore, depending on the growth rates and the market development, renewables could develop faster and could be in the long term cheaper than CCS based plants. Especially, in Germany, CCS as a climate protection option is phasing a specific problem as a huge amount of fossil power plant has to be substituted in the next 15 years where CCS technologies might be not yet available. For a considerable contribution of CCS to climate protection, the energy structure in Germany requires the integration of capture ready plants into the current renewal programs. If CCS retrofit technologies could be applied at least from 2020, this would strongly decrease the expected CO2 emissions and would give a chance to reach the climate protection goal of minus 80% including the renewed fossil-fired power plants.
National welfare is no longer an effective frame of reference for enlightened foreign policy. Policy consideration must encompass the common welfare of a world society. Environmental and resource crises are inextricably tied to security and justice. Sixty years after the founding of the United Nations there should be a new effort to establish a genuinely sustainable global order - a "San Francisco 2.0".
Stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere at levels compatible with sustainable development is the objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and an imperative for the global community. This is a daunting task, and its magnitude and costs are debated among scientists as well as policy-makers [Stern, 2006]. While most GHGs in the past have been emitted by developed countries and they are called upon to reduce their emissions and take responsibility for past mistakes, the contribution of developing countries in the future will reach similar magnitudes and is equally threatening for life on this planet. While developing countries have no commitments under the UNFCCC, they can still contribute voluntarily to climate change mitigation. The Global Environment Facility (GEF), as the financial mechanism of the UNFCCC and the leading multilateral entity promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy in developing countries and countries in transition, needs to provide significant support to these countries with respect to reaching a path of sustainable energy supply and sustainable economic and social development. Since 1992, the GEF has provided around US$ 2 billion in grants to support projects in the climate change focal area, leveraging over US$ 10 billion in total investments. Most of these funds have been spent on climate change mitigation projects. The GEF's mandate with respect to mitigation is to develop, expand, and transform markets for energy and mobility in developing countries, enabling them to grow toward and efficiently operate on a less carbon-intensive path. In doing so, the GEF applies the incremental cost principle and is restricted in the selection of technologies by a number of factors. Developing markets for sustainable energy technologies and sustainable framework conditions is a long-term effort, and it is hard to understand how effective the GEF is or can be in fulfilling this mission. This paper discusses the magnitude of the challenge, and demonstrates that this challenge is too big for the GEF's limited funds, and provides some suggestions for the GEF's programming for maximizing its impact on global GHG emissions by seeking out the most rewarding opportunities and maximizing replication of successful project examples by effective outreach and knowledge management.
Approaches to address unsustainable ways of societal development constantly proliferate, but total consumption of resources and aggregate environmental impacts continue rising. This could partially be explained by weak attempts to develop comprehensive sustainability strategies that address the entire life cycle of products and especially resource extraction and use phases. This paper seeks to explore to what extent these life cycle stages and associated impacts are taken into account when various actors employ life cycle thinking and how these concerns can be better attended to in policy-making, business strategies and lifestyle choices. To accomplish this, we evaluate the efforts of the main stakeholders in reaching sustainable consumption and sustainable resource management, and impediments to further progress, and study whether and how deficits in these phases coincide and can potentially contribute to more holistic practical realization of life cycle thinking. We demonstrate that new approaches are needed to be able to tackle the international dimension of production and consumption.
Global climate
(2007)