Download or read book Handbook of Carbon Offset Programs written by Anja Kollmuss and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2010 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greenhouse gas (GHG) offsets have long been promoted as an important element of a comprehensive climate policy approach. Offset programs can reduce the overall cost of achieving a given emission goal by enabling emission reductions to occur where costs are lower. Offsets have the potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits, through technology development and transfer. They can also develop human and institutional capacity for reducing emissions in sectors and locations not included in a cap and trade or a mandatory government policy. However, offsets can pose a risk to the environmental integrity of climate actions, especially if issues surrounding additionality, permanence, leakage, quantification and verification are not adequately addressed. The challenge is to design offset programs and policies that can maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential risks. This handbook provides a systematic and comprehensive review of existing offset programs. It looks at what offsets are, how offset mechanisms function, and the successes and pitfalls they have encountered. Coverage includes offset programs across the full swath of applications including mandatory and voluntary systems, government regulated and private markets, carbon offset funds, and accounting and reporting protocols such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol and ISO 14064. Learning from the successes and failures of these programs will be essential to crafting effective climate policy. This is an essential reference for all regulators, policy makers, business leaders and NGOs concerned with the design and operation of GHG offset programs world-wide. Published with SEI
Download or read book Making Climate Policy Work written by Danny Cullenward and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Upsetting the Offset written by Steffen Böhm and published by Fastprint Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn't stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures.
Download or read book Evaluating Carbon Offsets from Forestry and Energy Projects written by Kenneth M. Chomitz and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the clean development mechanism, developing countries will be able to produce certified emissions reductions (CERs, sometimes called "offsets") through projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions below business-as-usual levels. The challenges of setting up offset markets are considerable. Do forestry projects, as a class, have more difficulty than energy projects reducing greenhouse gas emissions in ways that are real, measurable, additional, and consistent with sustainable development?
Download or read book Voluntary Carbon Markets written by Ricardo Bayon and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2012 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world carbon market is growing at a staggering rate with trading volumes into the tens of billions of dollars and approaching a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The growth prospects for business are enormous and the potential positive impacts for greenhouse gas emission reductions, climate policy options, renewable energy investment, development projects and efficiency gains are increasingly apparent.A key part of the market in greenhouse gas emissions is the rapidly growing voluntary carbon market driven by companies, organizations and individuals committed to efficiency, profitability and rapid action on climate change. HSBC, Volvo, Avis, Ricoh and American Express are but a few of the many companies now offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions and becoming 'carbon neutral', fuelling an international voluntary carbon market that is growing exponentially. This groundbreaking business book, written in a fast-paced journalistic style, draws together all the key information on international voluntary carbon markets with commentary from leading practitioners and business people. The voluntary market is complex, fragmented and multi-layered, but it is beginning to consolidate around a few guiding practices and business models from which conclusions can be drawn about market direction and opportunities.The book covers all aspects of voluntary carbon markets around the world: what they are, how they work and, most critically, their business potential to help slow climate change. It is the indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand voluntary carbon markets and capitalize on the opportunities they present for economic and environmental benefit. If you want to be ahead of the curve for the next big thing, you need this book.
Download or read book The Green Paradox written by Hans-Werner Sinn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-02-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading economist develops a supply-side approach to fighting climate change that encourages resource owners to leave more of their fossil carbon underground. The Earth is getting warmer. Yet, as Hans-Werner Sinn points out in this provocative book, the dominant policy approach—which aims to curb consumption of fossil energy—has been ineffective. Despite policy makers' efforts to promote alternative energy, impose emission controls on cars, and enforce tough energy-efficiency standards for buildings, the relentlessly rising curve of CO2 output does not show the slightest downward turn. Some proposed solutions are downright harmful: cultivating crops to make biofuels not only contributes to global warming but also uses resources that should be devoted to feeding the world's hungry. In The Green Paradox, Sinn proposes a new, more pragmatic approach based not on regulating the demand for fossil fuels but on controlling the supply. The owners of carbon resources, Sinn explains, are pre-empting future regulation by accelerating the production of fossil energy while they can. This is the “Green Paradox”: expected future reduction in carbon consumption has the effect of accelerating climate change. Sinn suggests a supply-side solution: inducing the owners of carbon resources to leave more of their wealth underground. He proposes the swift introduction of a “Super-Kyoto” system—gathering all consumer countries into a cartel by means of a worldwide, coordinated cap-and-trade system supported by the levying of source taxes on capital income—to spoil the resource owners' appetite for financial assets. Only if we can shift our focus from local demand to worldwide supply policies for reducing carbon emissions, Sinn argues, will we have a chance of staving off climate disaster.
Download or read book Financing Nature Based Solutions written by Robert C. Brears and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new research on innovative financial instruments and approaches available to implement nature-based solutions (NBS) at various scales and in different contexts. Despite knowledge of the multiple benefits NBS provide, a key barrier to their wide-spread adoption is a lack of knowledge over their financing, in particular, who should pay for an NBS and how it can be financed. The book explores a variety of public, private, and blended finance models and their applicability in developing NBS across terrestrial and marine ecosystems, involving multiple stakeholders, and in jurisdictions of varying climates and income levels. Furthermore, the book provides case studies of the innovative financing of NBS with best practices identified. This book is of interest to environmental planners, resource conservation managers, policymakers, international companies and organizations, environmental NGOs, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students interested in NBS.
Download or read book Handbook of Carbon Offset Programs written by Anja Kollmuss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greenhouse gas (GHG) offsets have long been promoted as an important element of a comprehensive climate policy approach. Offset programs can reduce the overall cost of achieving a given emission goal by enabling emission reductions to occur where costs are lower. Offsets have the potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits, through technology development and transfer. They can also develop human and institutional capacity for reducing emissions in sectors and locations not included in a cap and trade or a mandatory government policy. However, offsets can pose a risk to the environmental integrity of climate actions, especially if issues surrounding additionality, permanence, leakage, quantification and verification are not adequately addressed. The challenge is to design offset programs and policies that can maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential risks. This handbook provides a systematic and comprehensive review of existing offset programs. It looks at what offsets are, how offset mechanisms function, and the successes and pitfalls they have encountered. Coverage includes offset programs across the full swath of applications including mandatory and voluntary systems, government regulated and private markets, carbon offset funds, and accounting and reporting protocols such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol and ISO 14064. Learning from the successes and failures of these programs will be essential to crafting effective climate policy. This is an essential reference for all regulators, policy makers, business leaders and NGOs concerned with the design and operation of GHG offset programs world-wide. Published with SEI
Download or read book Voluntary Carbon Offsets written by Jonathan L. Ramseur and published by . This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Businesses and individuals are buying carbon offsets to reduce their ¿carbon footprint¿ or to categorize an activity as ¿carbon neutral.¿ Contents of this report: (1) Introduction; (2) What are Carbon Offsets?; (3) Carbon Offset Integrity Issues: Additionality; Measurement Challenges: Baseline Determination; Double Counting; Permanence; (4) Carbon Offset Types and Potential Integrity Concerns: Biological Sequestration; Renewable Energy Projects; Energy Efficiency; Reduction of Non-CO2 Emissions from Specific Sources; (5) The Size of the Voluntary Carbon Offset Market: Over-the-Counter (Retail) Offsets; Chicago Climate Exchange; (6) Assessment of Carbon Offset Sellers; (7) Conclusions. Charts and tables.
Download or read book Modeling the Economics of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Models are fundamental for estimating the possible costs and effectiveness of different policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There is a wide array of models to perform such analysis, differing in the level of technological detail, treatment of technological progress, spatial and sector details, and representation of the interaction of the energy sector to the overall economy and environment. These differences impact model results, including cost estimates. More fundamentally, these models differ as to how they represent fundamental processes that have a large impact on policy analysis-such as how different models represent technological learning and cost reductions that come through increasing production volumes, or how different models represent baseline conditions. Reliable estimates of the costs and potential impacts on the United States economy of various emissions reduction and other mitigation strategies are critical to the development of the federal climate change research and development portfolio. At the request of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Academies organized a workshop, summarized in this volume, to consider some of these types of modeling issues.
Download or read book Exploring the Market for Voluntary Carbon Offsets written by Nadaa Taiyab and published by IIED. This book was released on 2006 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the potential for financing small-scale high-benefit sustainable development projects through the voluntary and retail sector of the carbon market.
Download or read book Understanding Carbon Credits written by Gurmit Singh and published by Aditya Books Pvt. Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Carbon Fix written by Stephanie Paladino and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the growing urgency to develop global responses to a changing climate, The Carbon Fix examines the social and equity dimensions of putting the world’s forests—and, necessarily, the rural people who manage and depend on them—at the center of climate policy efforts such as REDD+, intended to slow global warming. The book assesses the implications of international policy approaches that focus on forests as carbon and especially, forest carbon offsets, for rights, justice, and climate governance. Contributions from leading anthropologists and geographers analyze a growing trend towards market principles and financialization of nature in environmental governance, placing it into conceptual, critical, and historical context. The book then challenges perceptions of forest carbon initiatives through in-depth, field-based case studies assessing projects, policies, and procedures at various scales, from informed consent to international carbon auditing. While providing a mixed assessment of the potential for forest carbon initiatives to balance carbon with social goals, the authors present compelling evidence for the complexities of the carbon offset enterprise, fraught with competing interests and interpretations at multiple scales, and having unanticipated and often deleterious effects on the resources and rights of the world’s poorest peoples—especially indigenous and rural peoples. The Carbon Fix provides nuanced insights into political, economic, and ethical issues associated with climate change policy. Its case approach and fresh perspective are critical to environmental professionals, development planners, and project managers; and to students in upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental anthropology and geography, environmental and policy studies, international development, and indigenous studies.
Download or read book The Design and Implementation of US Climate Policy written by Don Fullerton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book contains the proceedings of an NBER conference held in Washington, DC, on May 13-14, 2010"--Page xi.
Download or read book Forest Carbon Markets Potential and Drawbacks written by Ross W. Gorte and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report describes current markets for forest carbon sequestration, the potential for using forest to offset other sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and the drawbacks related to forest carbon sequestration efforts.
Download or read book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster written by Bill Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.
Download or read book Understanding and Analysis The California Air Resources Board Forest Offset Protocol written by Eric Marland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a product of the initial phase of a broader study evaluating the voluntary and regulatory compliance protocols that are used to account for the contributions of forests in U.S.-based greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation programs. The research presented here is particularly concerned with these protocols’ use of the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data to describe forest conditions, ownership, and management scenarios, and is oriented towards providing regulators and other interested parties with an objective comparison of the options, uncertainties, and opportunities available to offset GHG emissions through forest management. Chapters focus on the protocols for recognizing forest carbon offsets in the California carbon cap-and-trade program, as described in the Compliance Offset Protocol; U.S. Forest Projects (California Air Resources Board, 2011). Readers will discover the protocols used for quantifying the offset of GHG emissions through forest-related project activity. As such, its scope includes a review of the current methods used in voluntary and compliance forest protocols, an evaluation of the metrics used to assign baselines and determine additionality in the forest offset protocols, an examination of key quantitative and qualitative components and assumptions, and a discussion of opportunities for modifying forest offset protocols, in light of the rapidly changing GHG-related policy and regulatory environment. Finally, the report also discusses accounting and policy issues that create potential barriers to participation in the California cap-and-trade program, and overall programmatic additionality in addressing the needs of a mitigation strategy.
