This report considers the implications of the Kyoto Protocol on competitiveness and addresses the WTO-compatibility of measures to offset competitive losses. From the outset the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have had to contend with perceived tension between effective action to slow climate change and maintenance of competitiveness. This report explores the nature of the concerns over competitiveness, trying to dissect them in a meaningful way and assess the need for concern.

This report gives a detailed account of emissions trading schemes and their potential for environmental mitigation and profit generation. The authors cover the U.S. acid rain program, the Kyoto protocol and its clean development mechanism, the European Union emissions trading scheme, climate exchanges, China's pilot programs, and the possibility of linking up these disparate systems.

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.