Climate discussions like those we’ve just been seeing at the UN summit in Katowice, Poland tend to focus on working together to deliver existing climate commitments and raising ambition—getting countries to reduce more GHG emissions, faster. But there’s an equally important issue that gets far less attention: ensuring climate action is delivered in a way that doesn’t leave anyone behind, particularly the world’s most vulnerable people.
See Helen Mountford and Molly McGregors’ latest blog post on how carbon pricing can benefit the poor and reduce emissions.
The Arab Gulf States – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE –are highly vulnerable to oil price shocks due to their high economic reliance on oil and gas export revenues. Historically, oil price shocks have been a source of pressure on the Arab Gulf States economies. However, only since mid-2014 have oil prices seemed to pressure on political regimes to consider domestic economic reforms and development of alternative sources of income (i.e. economic diversification).
To avoid long-term negative implications – such as increasing total CO2 emissions and deterioration of air quality associated with increasing downstream petrochemical energy intensive industries, fossil fuel subsidy reforms, enhancing energy efficiency and the use of clean energy technologies are indeed instrumental to tackle such issues. In this article, carbon pricing is proposed as a useful instrument to complement the aforementioned tools.
To address the global development risks posed by climate change, a major technological shift leading to a substantial reduction in the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will be necessary. In parallel, the substantial global economic and development distortions - that lead to inequality - do not enable the technological and financial transfers needed for a sustainable and equitable global economy. This brings us to a fundamental question: when climate change only imposes an additional threat of unseen scale, how can we change the economic status-quo?
Statoil has been operating in a market where an external carbon price has existed since the early 1990s. Due to CO2 tax and other regulatory measures the oil and gas industry in Norway has adopted emission-reduction measures corresponding to more than five million tonnes of CO2 per annum since 1996. Consequently, Norwegian oil and gas production is in the global premier division for low GHG emissions and the average amount emitted per unit produced is about half the world average.
The impacts of the changing climate are becoming increasingly evident, especially for the most vulnerable people in the world. We must limit the carbon and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. There is no Plan B because, as President Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has said, “There is no Planet B.”
In the wake of the historic Paris Agreement, new partnerships are emerging around the world to keep the momentum on climate action going — including the Declaration on Carbon Pricing in the Americas. Neydi Cruz, Angela Churie Kallhauge, Dirk Forrister, and Nathaniel Keohane lay out the background to the Declaration and what the partners have achieved since its December 2017 signing.
As the global economy heads towards large scale carbon emission reductions, implementation will be challenging for some and progress may be limited as a result. But as has been the case in all aspects of economic growth over many centuries, trade should be fully utilised to solve these issues and move forward.
Much of global climate action today is focused on tackling emissions from the energy sector and industrial activities. The importance of decarbonizing transport, a sector that produces around one quarter of energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, has been rather under-appreciated. In the United States, transportation has overtaken power generation as the number one emitter of carbon emissions. And with ever increasing demand for mobility and the rise of renewables in the power sector, transportation’s slice of the global emissions pie is expected to grow further, unless a concerted global effort to is undertaken to buck the tide.
Ukrgasbank has become the first ECO-bank in Ukraine, to support renewable energy projects and introduce environmental standards in manufacturing, transport and social life of every Ukrainian.
In 2017, we continued to see steady growth of carbon pricing in Asia. Some of the encouraging trends include China’s launching its national emission trading system (ETS) in December 2017, Kazakhstan restarting its ETS in 2018 after a two-year suspension, Korean introducing new design reforms in the ETS, Singapore preparing to implement a carbon tax from 2019 and India declaring its intention to launch a voluntary carbon market in the country.
I was one of the architects behind the CPLC, and have recently moved to a new position to help the International Finance Corporation promote private sector-led development. Departing put me in reflective mode: how did this unique, impactful initiative come to exist? And can a bottom-up, public-private initiative, provide lessons to those seeking new models to tackle other global challenges?
