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According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Kyoto Protocol under it, industrial countries have to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions annually, and assess the uncertainties in these estimates. In Finland, agricultural methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions represent 7% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and globally the share is much higher. Agriculture is one of the most uncertain emission categories (representing over 20% of greenhouse gas inventory uncertainty in Finland), due to both high natural variability of the emission sources and poor knowledge of the emission-generating processes. In this paper, we present an uncertainty estimate of agricultural CH4 and N2O emissions from Finland in 2002. Uncertainties were estimated based on measurement data, literature and expert judgement, and total uncertainty in agriculture was calculated using Monte Carlo simulation. According to the calculations, agricultural CH4 and N2O emissions from Finland were 3.7 to 7.8 Tg carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents, 5.4 Tg being the mean value.Estimates of CH4 emissions are more reliable than those of N2O. N2O from agricultural soils was the most uncertain emission category, and the uncertainty was not reduced by using available national measurement data of N2O fluxes. Sensitivity study revealed that the uncertainty in total agricultural inventory could be 7% points lower, if more accurate emission estimation methods were used, including 1) improved data collection in area estimates of organic soils, 2) climate-specific methods for N2O from agricultural soils as already presented in literature, and 3) more detailed CH4 estimation methods for enteric fermentation which can be achieved by investigating national circumstances and digestible systems of animals in more detail.

Fires have attracted interest and generated alarm since the early 1980s. This con- cern has been particularly evident in tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, but disastrous fires in recent summers in Australia, Europe, and the United States have drawn worldwide attention. Concern about forest fires, and related air pollution and biodiversity impacts, led inter- national organisations and northern countries - such as the Asian Development Bank, the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the government of Germany - to undertake fire assessments and provide technical assistance. Nongovernmental organisations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and World Wide Fund for Nature, have also devoted increased attention to fires. Aiming at prevention of future fires, 40 fire projects and missions costing well over US$30 million have worked in Indonesia over the last 20 years. Despite the money and effort spent on them, fires continue to burn every year. It may appear to some that efforts to address the 'fire problem' have not been effective as fires still occur.

This paper presents estimates of short-run sectoral and economy-wide effects of the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia. The results are derived using an enhanced version of the ORANI multi-sectoral model of the Australian economy. We simulate the introduction of a carbon tax at a rate of 1991-92 $25 per tonne, designed to achieve the Toronto target of a 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below the 1988 level by 2005. We find that the macroeconomic impact would depend critically on the extent to which price rises flowed through into wage rates. Assuming fixed money wages, real GDP would be decreased by an estimated 0.9 per cent, and employment by 1.2 per cent. To maintain a given employment level in the face of the carbon tax would require a reduction in the foreign-currency-equivalent wage rate estimated at 2.8 per cent. This would also entail a decrease in the real wage rate (defined with respect to the consumption price deflator) of 2.8 per cent. Government could promote lower wage outcomes by returning the carbon tax revenue to the community through reductions in other taxes. Enhancements to ORANI used in this simulation include disaggregation of the fossil fuel sector and provision for carbon taxation.

Buildings account for nearly 50% of all greenhouse gases globally. While this has been widely recognized, the GHG mitigation strategies have traditionally concentrated on reducing the use phase emissions, as over 90% of the emissions are generated during the use phase according to several studies. However, two current developments increase the importance of the construction phase emissions and the embodied emissions of the building materials. Firstly, the improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings directly increase the relative share of the construction phase emissions. Secondly, the notification of the temporal allocation of the emissions increases the importance of the carbon spike from construction. While these perspectives have been noted, few studies exist that combine the two perspectives of the construction and the use phase. In this paper, we analyze the implications of low-carbon residential construction on the life cycle emissions of a residential area with a case study. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when the temporal allocation of the emissions is taken into account, the construction phase emissions can hinder or even reverse the carbon mitigation effect of low-carbon buildings for decades.

This paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive. We consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness (or insufficiency) of current consumption. One is an intertemporal utility-maximization criterion: actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility. The other is a sustainability criterion, which requires that current consumption be consistent with non-declining living standards over time. We extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change. In applying this formula, we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion: in these regions, genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital.

Price floors in greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes can guarantee minimum abatement efforts if prices are lower than expected, and they can help manage cost uncertainty, possibly as complements to price ceilings. Provisions for price floors are found in several recent legislative proposals for emissions trading. Implementation however has potential pitfalls. Possible mechanisms are government commitments to buy back permits, a reserve price at auction, or an extra fee or tax on acquittal of emissions permits. Our analysis of these alternatives shows that the fee approach has budgetary advantages and is more compatible with international permit trading than the alternatives. It can also be used to implement more general hybrid approaches to emissions pricing.

The global community has been struggling with the issue of how to effectively respond to the threat of climate change for several decades. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced a landmark treaty on climate change that undertook to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. By focusing on stabilization, however, the treaty implicitly adopted the position that the risks posed by climate change require that emissions be reduced no matter what the cost. The agreement, signed and ratified by more than 186 countries, including the United States, spawned numerous subsequent rounds of climate negotiations aimed at rolling back emissions from industrialized countries to the levels that prevailed in 1990. To date, however, the negotiations have had little effect on greenhouse gas emissions and have not produced a detectable slowing in the rate of emissions growth. The treaty’s implementing protocol, the 1997 Kyoto agreement, has stalled after being heavily diluted at subsequent negotiations in Bonn and Marrakesh.2 The survival of the Kyoto Protocol in its current form is waiting for ratification from Russia. More than a decade of negotiations has produced a policy that is very strict in principle but completely ineffective in practice.