Lifetime leveraging: An approach to achieving international agreement and effective climate protection using mitigation of short-lived greenhouse gases

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach to post-Kyoto climate negotiations that could provide a way out of the apparent deadlock between developed and developing countries. This is an urgent issue as the world already appears to be close to a level of climate change that could be considered "dangerous". Design/methodology/approach-The paper explores the potential that control of short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane, tropospheric ozone, and soot could have, in addition to steep cutbacks in industrialized nations, to both mitigate global warming and overcome political stalemate in the international climate negotiations. Findings-Although rarely mentioned in climate discourse, reducing emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases offers a cost-effective way of actually reducing the radiative forcing in the atmosphere, while at the same time producing substantial subsidiary benefits such as improved urban air quality. The paper suggests leveraging this potential in the post-Kyoto treaty in order to "buy time" to address the arguably more difficult problem of essentially eliminating fossil-fuel related CO 2 emissions, which will ultimately be required to truly bring climate change under control. While high-income countries work on steep cutbacks of all greenhouse gas emissions, middle-income nations could make significant additional contributions by undertaking commitments to control only short-lived greenhouse gases until they reached a threshold level of per-capita GDP, at which point they would cap and begin reducing all greenhouse gas emissions. Originality/value-This paper recognizes that political tradeoffs will have to be made in negotiating the next climate treaty, and offers a way of approaching these tradeoffs that could minimize resulting environmental damage.

Does black carbon abatement hamper CO 2 abatement?

“…2 is above the red lines). The current ad-hoc proposal of shortening the time horizon alone (Bond and Sun 2005;Grieshop et al 2009;Moore and MacCracken 2009) is not a good way forward; the BC abatement needs to be addressed in concert with the overall goal.…”

“…Advocates of strong reductions in SLCFs open for the possibility of using GWPs with a 20-year time horizon (instead of the current 100-year time horizon) (Bond and Sun 2005;Grieshop et al 2009;Moore and MacCracken 2009), which leads to larger metric values for SLCFs (Forster et al 2007;Tanaka et al 2009;Fuglestvedt et al 2010). When one looks only at metrics, an obvious side effect of a shorter time horizon is that less emphasis is put on CO 2 abatement (Quinn et al 2008).…”

Joint CO 2 and CH 4 accountability for global warming

“…Effort could be put into finding ways for carbon trading and offset schemes to increasingly consider CH 4 . Less clear are the implications for negotiations related to "post-Kyoto" international climate change regime (41). On one hand, as a group, developing countries might be considered somewhat more accountable for current warming patterns than currently perceived as a result of considering historical CH 4 emissions in addition to historical CO 2 (f).…”