Axel Michaelowa

Carbon markets – both emission trading systems and baseline and credit systems – are an increasingly common policy instrument being introduced to address climate change mitigation. However, their design is crucial to ensure that they deliver cost-effective emission reductions while maintaining environmental integrity. This Element puts together a comprehensive, principle-based overview of the risks and abuses to environmental integrity and cost effectiveness that have emerged for carbon markets at all jurisdictional levels around the world, provides concrete examples, and offers effective policy and governance solutions to overcome such risks. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book assesses the structure of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It explains why, instead of the expected bilateral structure where a company from an industrialized country invests in a project in a developing country and receives the emission reduction credits in return, a unilateral structure prevails whereby a company from a developing country finances the emission reduction project itself and sells the emission reduction credits. The book arrives at three fundamental, interconnected, conclusions: CDM is logically a unilaterally driven investment activity; CDM investment is an irrelevant compliance instrument for companies from industrialised countries and that this state of affairs is unlikely to change post 2012; and CDM thrives in less equal and less ambitious post-2012 climate regimes. Unique in its analysis of corporate views on investment in CDM projects, this book will find widespread appeal amongst climate policy analysts, company representatives involved in developing CDM acquisition strategies and climate policymakers. It will also be of interest to anyone involved in the study of climate change, emissions reduction and trading and carbon markets.