This book identifies how climate change policy uncertainty may affect investment behaviour in the power sector. For power companies, where capital stock is intensive and long-lived, those risks rank among the biggest and can create an incentive to delay investment. The analysis results show that the risk premiums of climate change uncertainty can add 40% of construction costs of the plant for power investors, and 10% of price surcharges for the electricity end-users. This book also tells what can be done in policy design to reduce these costs.

This study looks at trends in GHG emissions in different regions across the world, and analyses the major drivers. It provides an overview of the policies, strategies and measures being adopted and planned worldwide to combat climate change. It compares the different approaches adopted in different regions and the reasons for differences in emphasis. It assesses the measures in terms of their expected impacts on the key WEC objectives of energy accessibility, availability and acceptability.

The global debate over who should take action to address climate change is extremely precarious, as diametrically opposed perceptions of climate justice threaten the prospects for any long-term agreement. Poor nations fear limits on their efforts to grow economically and meet the needs of their own people, while powerful industrial nations, including the United States, refuse to curtail their own excesses unless developing countries make similar sacrifices.

This book concentrates on transactions involving forward carbon credits, in other words transactions where the parties to a contract agree to buy or sell carbon credits to be generated and delivered in the future. As a result, it does not deal either with transactions involving carbon credits already issued for immediate delivery on the spot market or with derivatives in the form of option contracts or future contracts through the developing exchange markets.

This book reports on the work carried out by the research project 'Kyoto: think global act local", which aims to bring local sustainable forest management projects under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. The book draws on work carried since 2003 at three sites in India and Nepal. In India, the project sites were in Uttarakhand state, and in Nepal, in Ilam, Lalitpur, and Manang districts. The project gathered data to show that community-managed forests can play important roles in mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change by sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere.