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.
The success of international efforts to manage climate change depends on the participation of emerging economies. This book uses a comparative study of two of the most important, India and South Africa, to reveal new insights into managing climate change on a global scale.
The book provides a unique in-depth analysis of how these two countries are dealing with climate change at both national and province levels, from India’s advances in solar and wind energy development to South Africa’s efforts to introduce a carbon tax. Using the innovative theoretical framework of climate knowledge systems, it explores how people in India and South Africa engage with one other, learn and act by forming communities of practice. The book identifies the drivers and barriers of climate governance, showing how different forms of scientific, technological, normative and pragmatic knowledge can aid climate governance and analysing how the underlying mind-set that guides climate action in these countries is changing.
Domestic climate policies and the actual environmental performance differ between emerging economies. Using a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), this paper tests the influence of the domestic green industry, the ratio of fossil fuels to financial power, the international negotiating position, and the environmental civil society in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa. A bad ratio of domestic fossil fuel production to financial power and a weak environmental civil society are a sufficient condition for weak climate policy performance. A weak domestic green industry combined with a weak influence of the negotiations only explains some of the cases.
This paper was prepared at the request of the Republic of Nauru, Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. The global low-carbon transformation, needed to tackle the climate crisis is within reach but will require immediate decisive political action from leaders around the world. This paper identified the imperatives for transformative action to a low-carbon economy, technological opportunities, as well as necessary policy, financial and economic considerations.
In recent years there has been increasing support for establishing successful models of REDD+ and low emissions development (LED) efforts at a jurisdictional scale. Jurisdictional efforts were designed to overcome the shortcomings of project-based approaches by working across land-use types and with multiple stakeholders to create models for national implementation. This study analyzes some of the most advanced REDD+/LED initiatives worldwide - including a critical look at the success and challenges to date - to understand what is needed to succeed going forward. Eight diverse jurisdictions were studied: Acre, Brazil; Berau, Indonesia; Ghana’s cocoa ecoregion; Mai Ndombe, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); San Martín, Peru; São Félix do Xingu, Brazil; the Terai Arc, Nepal; and the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.