Carmen Bunzl - Universidad Pontificia Comillas

Chapter 2. Options for future climate change architectures 44
- Top-down basis: An overall target can be given to a group of
countries, with the group deciding internally how to share the target
amongst the participants. It has already been applied to the EU in the
Kyoto Protocol.
Together with the national emission targets, flexibility provisions may also
be set, as to ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘what’ emissions are to be reduced.
Some of the flexibility mechanisms provided by the Kyoto Protocol are
International Emission Trading, Joint Implementation and the Clean
Development Mechanism.
In this section alternative target approaches to the already existing binding
absolute targets are first going to be introduced (Section 2.1.1). These may be
included as part of the proposals described afterwards.
Then, some approaches that set national emission targets and therefore can
be combined with international emission trading - such as the Multistage
approach (Section 2.1.2.1), Contraction and Convergence (Section 2.1.2.2), the
Tryptich approach (Section 2.1.2.4) or the Brazilian Proposal (Section 2.1.2.5) –
are going to be described.
After a brief overview of the approaches previously described (Section 2.1.3),
these are going to be assessed based on the criteria presented in Section 1.2
(Section 2.1.4). Finally, some conclusions on approaches that include national
emission targets and international emission trading are drawn (Section 2.1.5).
2.1.1 Alternative Target Approaches
In the Kyoto Protocol industrialized countries have absolute emission
reduction commitments. Developing countries have no targets, but may
participate through emission reduction projects with the Clean Development
Mechanism. In the following section the focus is on element 3: type of
commitments (see Section 1.1). Alternative types of commitments are going to
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería ICAI Carmen Bunzl Boulet Junio 2008