Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are deficient of domestic fossil energy sources and depend significantly on imported fuels. Since the oil shock in the 1970s, all three countries have promoted renewable energy as an alternative energy source to improve energy security. Currently, renewable energy is being promoted to build low-carbon economies. This study reviews the development of renewable energy policies and roadmaps. It also examines and compares strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of these countries in the context of advancing renewable energy policies and technologies and expanding domestic renewable energy installations, as well as strategically positioning themselves in the international renewable energy market as exporters of clean energy technologies. Through the SWOT analysis, this paper identifies a capacity for additional renewable energy deployment in these countries and highlights the necessity of increased cooperation between the three countries to strengthen their domestic and regional renewable energy sectors and compete in the global renewable energy market in the post-Fukushima era.
REDD is one of the latest additions to a series of incentive-based mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions. Many developing and emerging countries have started engaging in REDD. Peru, the country with the world’s fourth largest area of tropical forest, is no exception here – with an obvious motivation: about half of Peru’s annual greenhouse gas emissions are currently caused by deforestation.
Over the last years, public and private initiatives have led to a complex multi-level REDD governance architecture in Peru. This architecture faces challenges in terms of social inclusion and coordination. This study identifies and analyses key issues, some of which are merely teething problems, while others are deeply rooted in socio-economic imbalances and political culture, such as insufficient financial, technical and human capacities of ministries and regional governments; legitimacy gaps; and information and participation asymmetries across public actors, NGOs, companies and forest users.
This book is aimed at practitioners, students and scholars in architecture, urban planning and design. It features essays on ecologically sustainable cities by leading exponents of urban sustainability, case studies of the new directions low carbon cities might take and investigations of how we can mitigate urban heat stress in our cities’ microclimates. The book explores the underlying dimensions of how existing cities can be transformed into low carbon urban systems and describes the design of low carbon cities in theory and practice. It considers the connections between low carbon cities and sustainable design, social and individual values, public space, housing affordability, public transport and urban microclimates. Given the rapid urbanisation underway globally, and the need for all our cities to operate more sustainably, the book argues for the need to think about how spatial planning and design can help transform urban systems to create low carbon cities.
This paper presents a new research agenda on climate change and green growth from the perspective of the division of labor in classical economics. The paper covers three major dimensions of green growth (i.e. carbon emissions, environmental protection and material resources use) and some related important topics, as well as the fresh policy implications of the new research agenda. Typical marginal analysis in a given structure of the division of labor suggests that “green” action is a burden to economic development. Therefore, climate negotiation has become a burden-sharing game and has reached a stalemate. New thinking is badly needed to rescue these negotiations and to drive a shift to a new “green growth” paradigm. The proposed new research agenda represents an effort to create a new narrative on climate change and green growth. Because the new research agenda can theoretically predict the possibility that a more competitive structure of the division of labor could be triggered by “green” policy, it has promising policy implications for various important challenges facing us in the 21st century.
Since economic reforms began in 1978, China's urban population has increased by half a billion. Over the next 20 years, cities will likely add another 300 million people through local population growth, migration and the integration of nearby rural areas. Cities account for the majority of resource use and pollution so achieving greener growth will depend on developing and implementing a more sustainable urbanization model. China's leaders have responded to these challenges with ambitious goals and comprehensive environmental laws and regulations. These have so far not significantly reduced the harm from air, water and soil pollution: in large measure because China's green governance does not match its green ambitions. Drawing on the World Bank's work on green growth and a recent joint urbanization study by the Development Research Center of China's State Council and the World Bank, this paper reviews recent academic research on green governance in urban China and discusses its main implications in the context of emerging global green growth concepts.
The paper appears in the Special Issue: Climate Change and Green Growth: New Thinking.
Green growth cannot succeed without significant changes in the education system and the closely related social division of labor. This paper combines historical evidence and a game-theoretic analysis to study the relation between vocational education and green growth. It is found that a low-vocation and a high-vocation equilibrium can be distinguished in the interplay between education and labor markets, and that a high-vocation equilibrium is better suited for green growth. At the present stage of development, there are tendencies in both directions in China. Therefore, China has the possibility to successfully implement a green growth strategy by developing a strong vocational education with Chinese characteristics.
The paper appears in the Special Issue: Climate Change and Green Growth: New Thinking.