Reconciling Domestic Energy Needs and Global Climate Policy: Challenges and Opportunities for China and India
15.03.2010
15.03.2010
09:30 - 18:30
Both China and India are in the process of radically transforming their economies and their energy sectors. Wealthier consumers and a fast growing industry are demanding an ever growing amount of energy and the energy sector is responding with profound transformations to answer their needs. These transformations will have a tremendous effect on total CO2 emissions of both countries for decades to come. Governing this energy revolution in a sustainable way is thus essential for controlling global concentrations of Greenhouse Gases. However, including China and India in a global climate agreement as active partners, with binding emissions targets, is clearly rather difficult given their indisputable necessity to provide cheap and reliable energy to fuel economic growth at this crucial stage of their development process.
For this reason, any future climate agreement with binding emissions targets for China and India must be framed with a clear understanding of the dynamics and the needs of the energy sectors of both countries. Climate negotiators need tools to interpret the needs of the evolving energy sectors and insights on how to build this knowledge into an international agreement on climate.
Questions that are still open are many and of great importance. What are present energy demand and supply trends in both China and India? What are the major technological choices that governments and private actors are facing and how would they change in case of a constraint to carbon emissions? What are the costs of different targets under different assumptions on the circulation of knowledge? Are there technological and knowledge constraints or is it only a matter of high opportunity cost of investing in low carbon technologies? What are the opportunities for China and India to participate to an international agreement on climate? How can these challenges and opportunities be skillfully mixed in the next round of negotiations and what are the agreements that are more likely to succeed?
The purpose of this Workshop is to discuss ongoing work for the Special Issue "Reconciling Domestic Energy Needs and Global Climate Policy: Challenges and Opportunities for China and India", edited by Carlo Carraro and Emanuele Massetti for International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (INEA). A first set of papers will introduce present energy sector dynamics in China and India. A set of scenarios built using global and regional models will be presented to show the necessary transformations that China and India have to undertake were they part of a global agreement on climate with an active role. The challenges and opportunities of these required transformations will be then assessed by two papers, one on China and the other on India. A final set of three papers will discuss how to build a new international climate policy framework in which China and India will play an active role.
Invited authors are major world experts of energy and climate policy in China and India. There are the premises to make the Workshop and the Special Issue a valuable reference for those who are studying how China and India could contribute to climate change control.
The International Workshop on Reconciling Domestic Energy Needs and Global Climate Policy: Challenges and Opportunities for China and India, A Special Issue of the “International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (INEA), is organised by the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG), by the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) and by the Centro Euro Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC).
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