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Understanding the relationship between climate and crop productivity is a key component of projections of future food production, and hence assessments of food security. Climate models and crop yield datasets have errors, but the effects of these errors on regional scale crop models is not well categorized and understood. In this study we compare the effect of synthetic errors in temperature and precipitation observations on the hindcast skill of a process-based crop model and a statistical crop model. We find that errors in temperature data have a significantly stronger influence on both models than errors in precipitation. We also identify key differences in the responses of these models to different types of input data error. Statistical and process-based model responses differ depending on whether synthetic errors are overestimates or underestimates. We also investigate the impact of crop yield calibration data on model skill for both models, using datasets of yield at three different spatial scales. Whilst important for both models, the statistical model is more strongly influenced by crop yield scale than the process-based crop model. However, our results question the value of high resolution yield data for improving the skill of crop models; we find a focus on accuracy to be more likely to be valuable. For both crop models, and for all three spatial scales of yield calibration data, we found that model skill is greatest where growing area is above 10-15 %. Thus information on area harvested would appear to be a priority for data collection efforts. These results are important for three reasons. First, understanding how different crop models rely on different characteristics of temperature, precipitation and crop yield data allows us to match the model type to the available data. Second, we can prioritize where improvements in climate and crop yield data should be directed. Third, as better climate and crop yield data becomes available, we can predict how crop model skill should improve.

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.

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.

Abstract This paper provides an empirical estimation of energy efficiency and other proximate factors that explain energy intensity in Australia for the period 1978–2009. The analysis is performed by decomposing the changes in energy intensity by means of energy efficiency, fuel mix and structural changes using sectoral and sub-sectoral levels of data. The results show that the driving forces behind the decrease in energy intensity in Australia are efficiency effect and sectoral composition effect, where the former is found to be more prominent than the latter. Moreover, the favourable impact of the composition effect has slowed consistently in recent years. A perfect positive association characterizes the relationship between energy intensity and carbon intensity in Australia. The decomposition results indicate that Australia needs to improve energy efficiency further to reduce energy intensity and carbon emissions.

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.

This study investigates Australian federal politicians’ expertise in and attitudes towards climate change. Telephone interviews were conducted with a sample of 26 Members of Parliament (MPs). Results of the survey, undertaken in late 2009, suggest that climate change expertise is low to moderate among MPs, and that there is no correlation between expertise in and concern about climate change. The survey reveals important differences in attitudes to climate change by party. About 40 per cent of Coalition (Liberal and National) MPs are climate change ‘deniers’, but no Labor Party (ALP) MPs are. ALP MPs rate climate change as the most important (with water management) out of four long-term challenges, but Coalition MPs rate it as the least important (after not only water, but also aging and defence). All ALP MPs think climate change demands urgent action, and that Australia should play a leadership role globally, but only about one-fifth of Coalition MPs does. Even those Coalition MPs who are climate change ‘believers’ tend to give lower importance to climate change than ALP MPs.

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.

AbstractThis study examines the nature and consequences of China's rise to the center of world economic affairs through manufacturing‐led development. Our historical analysis shows that China is still well short of the point in its developmental process where its growth might be reasonably expected to slow, or the energy, resource and carbon intensity of growth to recede. The study argues that the current trajectory of industrialization will have to be altered when China becomes more actively engaged in dealing with structural issues at home and abroad against the background of the unwinding of global imbalances. One profitable strategy that China might employ would be to approximate the incredibly fruitful mass‐market integration efforts of the USA that eventually elevated it to its position of global primacy. The cyclical re‐emergence of excess capacity in Chinese heavy industry, serious questions about the medium term ability of other major regions to accommodate further large gains in Chinese market share, and the stark conflict between the contemporary style of industrial development and the health of the biosphere indicate strongly that now is the time to catalyze the required adjustment and reform processes that will underpin sustainable long‐run prosperity.