This paper presents three individual cases of a wind turbine producer, a wind farm and a wind blade producer to illustrate how foreign collaboration and technology, choice of deployment strategy, and government policy have influenced the sector to continually improve its technology. The findings indicate that foreign technology and collaboration have had a significant role in helping wind energy technology to develop in China, and were also key elements in stimulating indigenous innovation when high prices held the domestic wind market back from massive expansion. While public policy has played a key role in many aspects of the development of the innovation path, the long-term, enduring goal of developing the required technology was the essential driver. The development of the wind sector occurred alongside the economic development and social improvement of the nation. Thus, while it may be too soon to predict the future path of innovation for Chinese wind energy technology, an emphasis on research and development and increasing international competition is a trend that is likely to continue.
Long before the Kyoto Protocol was signed, a number of companies and NGOs started to invest voluntarily in forest carbon offsets thereby creating a voluntary carbon market. Within the climate movement, the assessment of forest carbon offsets for mitigating climate change is one of the major ‘battle lines.’ A large group of critical civil-society actors categorically rejects these instruments. This group sets the formation of carbon markets in the wider context of finance-driven neoliberalism. Rather established international NGOs, such as Conservation International actively support forest carbon offsets as additional incentives for forest conservation. In 2005 international NGOs, companies and academic institutions developed the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards (CCB). CCB standards aim to guarantee that certified projects mitigate climate change and contribute to local development and habitat conservation. Drawing on two forest carbon offsets certified according to the CCB standards this contribution analyzes the role of civil society actors within forest carbon offset governance and seeks to evaluate the in- and output legitimacy of the CCB standards.
In the first dispute on renewable energy to come to World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement, the domestic content requirement of Ontario’s feed-in tariff was challenged as a discriminatory investment-related measure and as a prohibited import substitution subsidy. The panel and Appellate Body agreed that Canada was violating the GATT and the TRIMS Agreement. But the SCM Article 3 claim by Japan and the European Union remains unadjudicated, because neither tribunal made a finding that the price guaranteed for electricity from renewable sources constitutes a ‘benefit’ pursuant to the SCM Agreement. Although the Appellate Body provides useful guidance to future panels on how the existence of a benefit could be calculated, the most noteworthy aspect of the new jurisprudence is the Appellate Body’s reasoning that delineating the proper market for ‘benefit’ analysis entails respect for the policy choices made by a government. Thus, in this dispute, the proper market is electricity produced only from wind and solar energy.
The analysis in this report focuses on selected production-consumption systems, which link environmental, social and economic systems across the world - generating earnings, supporting ways of living, and meeting consumer demands - and also account for much of humanity's burden on the environment. production and consumption are addressed together because they are highly interdependent. Only by adopting an integrated perspective is it possible to get a full understanding of these systems: the incentives that structure them, the functions they perform, the ways system elements interact, the impacts they generate, and the opportunities to reconfigure them.
This working paper reviews the use of tax preferences to achieve environmental policy objectives. The paper suggests that the comparative advantage of tax preferences is in providing support for positive externalities. When designing tax preferences, care must be taken to ensure that they do not encourage technological lock-in, provide perverse incentives for environmentally harmful activities, or reward producers or consumers for actions they would have taken anyway. Since tax preferences are a form of subsidy, they should be subject to the same degree of scrutiny and oversight as other forms of public expenditure.
The book includes a survey assessing the performance of the United Nations and its member states in all key areas, laying down a road map for sustainable development in the future. Deploying the Human Green Development Index (HGDI) as a new metric for an era in which human survival is intimately dependent on the viability of the Earth as a clean and sustainable habitat, the report showcases a large array of data, including HGDI indicators for more than 120 nations.