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Carbon taxes represent a cost-effective way to steer the economy toward a greener future. In the real world, their application has however been limited. In this paper, we address one of the main obstacles to carbon taxes: public opposition. We identify drivers of and barriers to public support, and, under the form of stylized facts, provide general lessons on the acceptability of carbon taxes. We derive our lessons from a growing literature, as well as from a combination of policy "failures" and "successes." Based on our stylized facts, we formulate a set of suggestions concerning the design of carbon taxes. We consider the use of trial periods, tax escalators, environmental earmarking, lump-sum transfers, tax rebates, and advanced communication strategies, among others. This paper contributes to the policy debate about carbon taxes, hopefully leading to more success stories and fewer policy failures. This article is categorized under: Climate Economics > Economics of Mitigation.

This paper extends existing debate about the relationship between climate change and migration by locating this debate within the registers of race and difference. The paper argues that the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular racial orientation to climate change called ‘white affect’. To make this argument, the paper connects up two related phenomena: racial neoliberalism and the relationship between affect and biopower. The white affect of climate change and migration discourse is here understood to be an ‘object-target’ of biopolitics. White affect thus becomes an important concept for understanding how racial neoliberalism functions through affective proxy.

Climate services involve the generation, provision, and contextualization of information and knowledge derived from climate research for decision making at all levels of society. These services are mainly targeted at informing adaptation to climate variability and change, widely recognized as an important challenge for sustainable development. This paper reviews the development of climate services, beginning with a historical overview, a short summary of improvements in climate information, and a description of the recent surge of interest in climate service development including, for example, the Global Framework for Climate Services, implemented by the World Meteorological Organization in October 2012. It also reviews institutional arrangements of selected emerging climate services across local, national, regional, and international scales. By synthesizing existing literature, the paper proposes four design elements of a climate services evaluation framework. These design elements include: problem identification and the decision-making context; the characteristics, tailoring, and dissemination of the climate information; the governance and structure of the service, including the process by which it is developed; and the socioeconomic value of the service. The design elements are intended to serve as a guide to organize future work regarding the evaluation of when and whether climate services are more or less successful. The paper concludes by identifying future research questions regarding the institutional arrangements that support climate services and nascent efforts to evaluate them.

Carbon has been described as a ‘surreal commodity.’ While carbon trading, storage, sequestration, and emissions have become a part of the contemporary climate lexicon, how carbon is understood, valued, and interpreted by actors responsible for implementing carbon sequestration projects is still unclear. In this review paper, we are concerned with how carbon has come to take on a range of meanings. In particular, we appraise what is known about the situated meanings that people involved in delivering, and participating in, carbon sequestration projects in the global South assign to this complex element. There has been some reflection on the new meanings conferred on carbon via the neoliberal processes of marketisation and on how these processes interact with historical and contemporary narratives of environmental change. But less is known about how these meanings are (re)produced and (re)interpreted locally. We review how carbon has been defined both as a chemical element and as a tradable, marketable commodity. We discuss the implications these global meanings might have for situated understandings, particularly linked to climate change narratives, among communities in the global South. We consider how the concept of carbon capabilities, alongside theoretical notions of networks, assemblages, and local knowledges of the environment and nature, might be useful in beginning to understand how communities engage with abstract notions of carbon. We discuss the implications of specific values attributed to carbon, and therefore to different ecologies, for wider conceptualizations of how nature is valued, and climate is understood. We review in particular how this may impact on community interactions with carbon sequestration projects. Knowing more about how people understand, value, and know carbon allows policies to be better informed and practices more effectively targeted at engaging local populations meaningfully in carbon-related projects.

Carbon footprints for several shopping bag alternatives (polyethylene, paper, cotton, biodegradable modified starch, and recycled polyethylene) were compared with life cycle assessment. Stochastic uncertainty analysis was used to study the sensitivity of the comparison to scenario and parameter uncertainty. On the basis of the results, we could give only a few robust conclusions without choosing a waste treatment scenario or limiting the parameter space. Given the scenario of current waste infrastructure in Finland, recycled polyethylene bags seem to be the most preferable (−7 to 24 g CO2 eq./bag) and biodegradable bags the least preferable (38 to 60 g CO2 eq./bag) option. In each analyzed waste treatment scenario, a few parameters dominated the uncertainty of results. Most of these parameters were downstream of the shopping bag manufacturing (consumer behavior, landfill conditions, method of waste combustion, etc.). The choice of waste treatment scenario had a greater effect on the ranking of bags than parameter uncertainty within scenarios. This result highlights the importance of including several scenarios in comparative life cycle assessments.

A long history of interdisciplinary research highlights the powerful role that human values play in shaping individuals' engagement with environmental issues. That certain values are supportive of proenvironmental orientation and behavior is now well established. But as the challenge of communicating the risks of climate change has grown increasingly urgent, there has been a rise in interest around how values shape public engagement with this issue. In the current paper, we review the growing body of work that explores the role of human values (and the closely related concept of cultural worldviews) in public engagement with climate change. Following a brief conceptual overview of values and their relationship to environmental engagement in general, we then provide a review of the literature linking value-orientations and engagement with climate change. We also review both academic and ‘gray’ literature from civil society organizations that has focused on how public messages about climate change should be framed, and discuss the significance of research on human values for climate change communication strategies.

In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio-technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio-technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.

14 pages, 8 figures, Climate change is likely to result in significant alterations in the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, which may, as a result, affect species that depend on an ocean-driven nutrient supply and particularly those that possess a dispersal phase in their life history. In this paper we investigate the potential changes in larval dispersal and connectivity of marine populations on the Chilean coast due to altered wind forcing consistent with a future climate change scenario. Numerical ocean simulations forced by modeled present-day and future winds under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A2 scenario are used to investigate the potential changes in nearshore circulation. Off-line particle-tracking simulations are then analyzed to determine resulting changes in larval dispersal and connectivity under each scenario as a function of pelagic larval duration and for two different possible larval behaviors: passive and vertical migration. It is found that the projected future winds drive an intensification of the upwelling circulation, which results in a relative annual mean surface cooling of 1°C over much of the domain, an increase in the strength of the poleward undercurrent, and a more energetic mesoscale eddy field. Neutrally buoyant larvae are inferred to have low rates of settlement under present conditions and are more strongly disadvantaged under the simulated future conditions than larvae with vertically migrating behavior. Larvae that posses an ability to sink out of the surface Ekman layer are found to have higher rates of settlement under present conditions and are, in fact, favored slightly in the A2 scenario for pelagic larval durations longer than 2 days. This behavior-dependent response to future conditions may potentially drive a reorganization of coastal communities, Support for this study was provided through the Laboratorio Internacional en Cambio Global (LINCGlobal) and CMA through Fondecyt grant 1100646. We thank Rene Garreaud from the Universidad de Chile for providing the output from the PRECIS model simulations and for his useful comments. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise, and assistance provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. S.A.N. acknowledges support by FONDAP-FONDECYT grant 15001–0001 to CASEB

Atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature are increasing as a consequence of human activity. Periods of low water availability are expected to increase in Mediterranean ecosystems. Temperature gradient tunnels were used to provide near to ambient conditions and conditions simulating predicted increases in CO2 and temperature for an alfalfa crop. The performance, construction, and running costs of the tunnels are reported and discussed. Two levels of water supply were included in the treatments. Plants were grown in large, 13 L pots, keeping a fixed soil volumetric water content and with nodule fixation as the only nitrogen source for the plant. Regardless of water regime, the effect of elevated CO2 on plant growth was temperature dependent. Dry matter was enhanced when elevated CO2 and temperature were combined. Plant yield improvement was partly a result of increased photosynthetic rates. There were no effects on plant N concentration. Decreased specific nodule activity might suggest that lack of differences in plant N were a consequence of reduced nodule enzyme activity., This paper originates from an accompanyingmeasure OPTIMISE (Optimisation Of Water Use ByPlants In The Mediterranean) Contract Number:ICA3-CT-2002-50005 from European Commission programme INCO2: INCO-MED. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (BFI2000-0154), Spanish Commission of Science and Technology (AMB96-0396) and Fundación Universitaria de Navarra. I. AranjueloMichelena was the recipient of a research grant fromSpanish Ministry of Science and Technology(FP2000-52313).