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Sustainable socio-economic development requires a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We utilize an incentivized experiment to map the preferences of 'policymakers' over climate actions of 'decision-makers'. Our design guarantees that these preferences are unaffected by selfish motives such as a concern about being re-elected or an unwillingness to pay for the greater good. Few of our impartial policymakers choose interventions that leave the autonomy of decision-makers' completely untouched. The choice patterns of those who intervene suggest that policymakers care not only about minimizing emissions, but also about how emissions are reduced. Policymakers strongly prefer pricing policies over capping emissions, and among the pricing policies, they prefer those that include voluntary carbon offsets, even if this leaves considerable scope for decision-makers to selfishly emit CO 2. The reason is that policymakers expect decision-makers to voluntarily offset some of their emissions at their own cost, and believe that this would eventually improve the outcome in terms of both emissions and the decision-makers' profit relative to a standard carbon pricing policy (without offsetting). Our decision-making data confirm this expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambitious goals to limit global warming can only be reached with a broad acceptance and participation of the general public. This paper relies on surveys among citizens in China, Germany and the U.S. and investigates the determinants of the acceptance of national and international adaptation and mitigation efforts. The empirical findings indicate that specific beliefs and environmental awareness are important drivers in all three countries, while political attitudes and socio-economic characteristics are the main sources of cross-country heterogeneity. The study thereby points at important starting points and target groups for raising the acceptance of national and international climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the scope for simultaneously managing nutrient abatement and climate change mitigation in the Baltic Sea (BS) region through the implementation of a selection of measures. The analysis is undertaken using a cost-minimisation model for the entire BS region, the BALTCOST model. In the present research, the model has been extended to include greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions effects, enabling us to analyse the trade-offs between cost-effective GHG and nutrient load reductions. We run the model for four different scenarios in order to compare the environmental and economic consequences of contrasting strategies: single environmental objective management versus joint implementation strategy. The results show that implementing land-based measures with a sole focus on water quality (to meet the HELCOM's 2013 Baltic Sea Action Plan nutrient abatement targets) can produce climate change mitigation co-benefits equivalent to 2.3% of the 2005 emission level (from agriculture and waste water combined) for the entirety of the BS region. More interestingly, a joint implementation strategy can deliver further climate change mitigation benefit (i.e. up to 5.4%) at a marginal cost that is comparable to mitigation costs reported by other studies for efficient technologies. All in all the results demonstrate that a joint strategy to improve water quality and to reduce climate change is economically beneficial. Our findings show that the cost and the outcome of the implementation vary between countries. This illustrates the need to develop a joint regional policy for water and climate regulation that fully considers the asymmetry in both the expected effects and cost distribution across the countries in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has developed a strategy to mitigate climate change by cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fostering low carbon technologies. However, the risk of implementing unilateral policies is that distortive effects are generated at the global scale affecting world energy prices, international competitiveness and the geographical allocation of carbon intensive production processes. Using a dynamic CGE model, we assess the rate of carbon leakage and adverse impacts on competitiveness in a number of scenarios over the period 2010–2050. According to the model results, we highlight two major issues. First, in the case of a unilateral EU climate policy, carbon leakage and negative effects on competitiveness are quite serious. Anti-leakage measures can only mitigate leakage and adverse economic impacts on competitiveness in a limited way. On the contrary, an optimality analysis addressing the environmental effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and political feasibility of alternative policy solutions reveals that the EU long term decarbonisation strategy by investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy might ensure protection of vulnerable manufacturing activities while enhancing the competitiveness of technologically-advanced industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments worldwide have implemented climate change mitigation policies that aim to encourage abatement by changing agricultural practices. In Australia, farmers can gain carbon credits for sequestering carbon or reducing emissions. In addition to mitigation, these ‘carbon farming’ activities often generate ancillary (co-)benefits, such as creating native habitat or preventing erosion. This paper presents results of an Australia-wide choice experiment, conducted to estimate community values for climate change mitigation and the cobenefits of carbon farming. Values for carbon farming benefits are shown to depend on respondent's opinions about climate change. Respondents who do not believe that climate change is happening have a lower willingness to pay for reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions than people who believe climate change is (at least partly) caused by human actions. On average, respondents were willing to pay $1.13/Mt of CO 2 -e reduction. Respondents were willing to pay around $19/ha increase in the area of native vegetation on farmland. Value estimates for reducing soil erosion were not significant. Our results demonstrate that the community benefits from carbon farming extend beyond their effects on climate change mitigation. Future policies should take these positive values for cobenefits into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A strong mitigation effort is underway to reduce the levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. An allocation of the mitigation effort among multiple agents requires understanding which agent is responsible for what emissions, according to a defined measure of carbon responsibility. The metric adopted by current international climate policy is production-based (or territorial) responsibility. However, other types of responsibility have been discussed in the literature, namely consumption-based (or upstream) responsibility and downstream responsibility. In this paper we study the latter, which is little explored in the literature. We clarify the term through a novel nomenclature, income-based responsibility and present a case-study, with the quantification of income-based responsibility for 112 world regions, and the comparison of the results with production and consumption-based responsibilities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We use behavioral and experimental economics to study a particular aspect of the economics of climate change: the potential trade-off between countries'' investments in mitigation versus adaptation. While mitigation of greenhouse gases can be viewed as a public good, adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or the individual that invests in adaptation. We use a one-shot public-goods game that deviates from the standard public-goods game by introducing a stochastic term to account for probabilistic destruction in a climate-change setting, where the probability density function is mapped to within-group levels of mitigation. We compare low-vulnerability and high-vulnerability treatments by varying the magnitude of disaster across treatments. Our results show that there is no significant difference in the level of mitigation across these treatments. Further, our results emphasize the role of trust in enhancing cooperation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Kyoto Protocol created a framework of responsibilities and mechanisms to mitigate climate change by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The Protocol stipulates accounting and reporting of GHG emissions and removals, such as energy use, industrial processes, agriculture, waste and net emissions resulting from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities. Emissions reported according to the rules set by the Kyoto Protocol do not include GHG emissions outside a country's boundaries resulting from the production of imported goods or services. As a result, GHG accounts constructed according to the Kyoto Protocol reflect the GHG emissions resulting from the production system of a country, but not all the emissions resulting from the consumption of goods and services within the country. However, as previous studies demonstrate, a country's emission balance changes remarkably if emissions related to goods or services imported and exported are taken into account. Here, we go beyond the aforementioned studies which mainly focus on GHG emissions from fossil fuel combustion. We assess, in a first-order approach, upstream emissions that result from LULUC activities outside a country while the produced goods are consumed within the country. In our study we focus on Austria's livestock system to elucidate the difference between production and consumption-related emissions accounting approaches. We study direct and ''hidden'' (embodied) GHG emissions associated with Austria's bilateral trade in livestock and livestock-related products, based on the integration of full carbon accounting (FCA) and life cycle analysis (LCA). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Farmers' adoption of climate change mitigation measures is key to successfully reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. This article investigates the role of non-cognitive skills, namely self-efficacy and locus of control, in farmers' uptake of mitigation measures. The study is based on a combination of survey and census data from 105 farmers in Switzerland. Almost all farmers in our sample already adopt some of the considered measures to reduce greenhouse gases on their farm. On average, 37% of the mitigation measures available to the specific farm type are adopted. We find that a one standard deviation increase in non-cognitive skills is associated with a 20 to 40% higher share of adopted mitigation measures. This relationship is robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive vector of controls, inspired both from the agricultural economics and the psychology literature. Additionally, we find that omitted variable bias would need to be implausibly large to refute our findings. Finally, we explore potential mechanisms. The suggested pathway through which non-cognitive skills are associated with the adoption of climate change mitigation measures is the innovativeness of the farmers. Fostering farmers' non-cognitive skills could be an effective policy lever to accelerate the diffusion of climate change mitigation measures. • Understanding farmers' climate change mitigation behavior is key for reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. • Non-cognitive skills are positively associated with adoption of mitigation measures adoption. • Innovativeness is the suggested mechanism towards the uptake of greenhouse gas mitigation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]