In the Copenhagen Accord of December 2009, developed countries agreed to provide start-up finance for adaptation in developing countries and expressed the ambition to scale this up to $100 billion per year by 2020. The financial mechanisms to deliver this support have to be tailored to country and sector specific needs so as to enable domestic policy processes and self sustaining business models, and ...
This study models maximum temperatures in Switzerland monitored in twelve locations using the generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution. The parameters of the GEV distribution are determined within a Bayesian framework. We find that the parameters of the underlying distribution underwent a substantial change in the beginning of the 1980s. This change is characterised by an increase both in the level ...
The greenhouse gas mitigation potential of different economic sectors in three world regions are estimated using a bottom-up approach. These estimates provide updates of the numbers reported in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4). This study is part of a larger project aimed at comparing greenhouse gas mitigation potentials from bottom-up and top-down ...
This paper examines the effects of firm-level innovation in carbon-abatement technologies on optimal cap-and-trade schemes with and without price controls. We characterize optimal cap-and-trade regulation with a price cap and a price floor, and compare it to the special cases of pure taxation and a simple emissions cap. Innovation shifts the tradeoff between price- and quantity-based instruments towards ...
The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the main instrument to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Subject to a country specific limit, installations in the EU ETS can use EU allowances (EUA) and certified emissions reductions (CERs) generated through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to fulfil their emission reduction target. The CDM encourages and finances emission reduction projects ...
This paper examines the long-run relationship between energy consumption and real GDP, including energy prices, for 25 OECD countries from 1981 to 2007. The distinction between common factors and idiosyncratic components using principal component analysis allows to distinguish between developments on an international and a national level as drivers of the long-run relationship. Indeed, cointegration ...
Better understanding the innovative process of renewable energy technologies is important for tackling climate change. Though concentrating solar power is receiving growing interest, innovation studies so far have explored innovative activity in solar technologies in general, ignoring the major differences between solar photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies. This study relies on patent data to ...