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Title:
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Technology rules! Can technology-oriented agreements help address climate change?
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Author(s):
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Published by:
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Publication date:
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ECN
Policy Studies
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24-9-2009
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ECN report number:
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Document type:
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ECN-B--09-017
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Book
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Number of pages:
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Full text:
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255
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Download PDF
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Published in:.
Abstract:
This thesis deals with climate change, technology and reciprocity. Climate change, as an international collective action problem, requires international collaboration in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the vulnerability for climate change impacts is highest in countries which hold little responsibility for the problem, while the cost of mitigating climate change is highest in less affected countries. This distributional characteristic of climate change leads to the central barrier of international collaboration: a specific agreement to reduce emissions is not in the interest of those countries that should most urgently act.
Successful international agreements need reciprocity, i.e. a perceived equivalence of benefits between parties to an agreement. Agreements on emission reductions do not offer reciprocity to all parties, so there are weak incen-tives among parties to comply. This became clear as the Kyoto Protocol was implemented. Although agreed despite the distributional characteristics of climate change, the effectiveness of Kyoto was weakened because of the distributional problem structure of climate change as the defecting countries faced high costs of mitigation and had economic interests that prevailed over the need to reduce emissions.
For reciprocity, the design of an international regime on climate change should therefore not be based on emission reductions. There is general agreement that the emission reductions required to address climate change will need to be achieved through major investments in a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. Technology is broadly defined: know-how, methods, procedures, experience of successes and failures, physical devices and equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This thesis explored whether reciprocity in international climate agreements can be enhanced through international agreements focused on innovation and technology. In particular, the role and potential impacts of technology-oriented agreements from different perspectives were explored.
The main result is that technology-oriented agreements can provide more reciprocity than emission reduction targets, a finding that urgently needs to be recognised in the climate negotiations. In addition, a number of recommendations can be made to enable technology-oriented agreements. First, technology-oriented agreements should reflect the characteristics of the tech-nology they address and be aligned with the (vested) technological interests that prevail in the sector, to ensure a positive payback function of the agreements to important parties. Second, a smart combination of market-based and technology-oriented agreements would work best both for climate change in general and for technology transfer to developing countries, if collective ac-tion problems for international market-based instruments can be overcome. Third, if indeed market-based and technology-oriented instruments are combined, their co-existence under one regime is recommended over a fully fragmented regime. This is necessary to prevent problems related to lack of transparency and sketchy accountability that would compromise environmental effectiveness of the climate regime. And last, if technology-oriented agreements are applied as a replacement or as a geographically or functionally complement, they should be designed for technology implementation, to ensure both environmental and technological effectiveness.
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