Climate proposal competition

[rdouthwaite]

There's not a lot of time left to get entries in, but the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements is running a competition to design “a complete climate policy framework to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in the post-2012 period.” Entries have to be in by July 1st and there are an unspecified number of $3,000 prizes.

It strikes me that we have a near-complete policy framework in Cap and Share. The challenge would lie in presenting it in the way the contest demands. The announcement says that entries will be judged on “how effectively they address the following questions:

(1) What incentives does the policy framework provide for participation and compliance?

(2) Is the policy approach robust to various economic, political, and environmental shocks as well as the resolution of uncertainty over time?

(3) Is it politically feasible to transition from the Kyoto Protocol to the proposed policy architecture? How does the proposed approach address major issues raised in the Bali Action Plan, including mitigation, adaptation, technology, and financial mechanisms?

(4) What are the equity implications of the proposal?

(5) How does the proposal pursue cost-effective mitigation of climate change risks?

(6) How does the proposed framework provide the basis for satisfying the ultimate objective of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (Article 2)?

(7) What are the costs and benefits of the proposed policy architecture, to the extent these can be identified?”

You can find the announcement at http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/pub ... ition.html

My feeling is that if a Cap and Share entry was awarded a $3,000 prize, whoever put it in would be entitled to keep it. They would have helped enough by getting C&S the exposure.

Good luck,

Richard

[Laurence Matthews]

Dear all,

Here, for anyone interested, is my entry for this competition.

I don’t hold out any great hopes of winning the competition, but felt it was a good way of getting the ‘Cap & Share’ ideas into this Harvard group, which seems to have the ear of some in political circles, and is the group responsible for the recent book ‘Architectures for Agreement’ (see post of Feb 7).

Since I wrote it for the Harvard audience, the paper is written in a somewhat formal academic style, but basically argues for keeping things simple, and recognising equity. I describe C&S and then say C&C would be one way of tying together nations all doing C&S (it's notable that the 'A for A' book conspicuously manages not to mention C&C all the way through...), and then go on to say that C&S could also be done globally - which would in the end amount to the same thing (pace convergence funds).

Laurence