This paper contains detailed discussions on climate change strategies. It looks at climate change related issues in several sectors including forestry, energy (biofuels), waste management, and groundwater, as well as key institutional and industry developments in response to climate change challenges. The paper summarises current policy responses from around the Asia-Pacific region and attempts to sort effective climate change policy from non-effective policy.

Effort to develop a mandatory climate policy is accelerating and it seems likely that a national market-based strategy for dealing with climate change is on the near term horizon.

In the United States to date, most of the first genuine steps toward addressing the challenge of climate change have taken place at the state level. Many states have proceeded in a meaningful, comprehensive fashion while the federal government struggles to take its first significant step toward legislative or regulatory action. Yet it is clear that these state actions, even when taken together, are not enough to put the United States on a course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the level deemed necessary by the science.

The international climate negotiations have seen endless struggles between countries from South and North for almost 17 years, ever since the initiation of negotiations by the International Negotiation Committee for the UNFCCC.

This report offers a comprehensive analysis of a suite of climate policy initiatives associated with a cap and trade program with the goal of identifying those empirical and design issues that most influence the economic consequences of their enactment. Empirically, present-value policy costs heavily depend on the actual outcomes of household consumption-saving and labor-leisure decisions, the magnitudes of and any induced changes in sectoral demand elasticities and technological trends, and the resulting time paths of permit prices and market interest rates.

Virtually every aspect of economic activity results in greenhouse gas emissions, so meaningful climate policies will need to alter the fossil fuel foundation of economies over the long term. Climate change policy will likely cost more, benefit more, and require more changes in behavior by firms and individuals than any other environmental policy. The magnitude of this challenge has drawn attention to the potential use of market-based or economic-incentive instruments