• Energy Research

The carbon market experiences of Brazil and India represent policy success stories under several criteria. A careful evaluation, however, reveals challenges to market development that should be addressed in order to make the rollout of a post-2012 CDM more effective. We conducted firm-level interviews covering 82 CDM plants in the sugar and cement sectors in Brazil and India, focusing on how individual managers understood the potential benefits and risks of undertaking clean development mechanism (CDM) investments. Our results indicate that the CDM operates in a far more complex way in practice than that of simply adding a marginal increment to a project's internal rate of return. Our results indicate the following: first, although anticipated revenue played a central role in most managers' decisions to pursue CDM investments, there was no standard practice to account for financial benefits of CDM investments; second, some managers identified non-financial reputational factors as their primary motivation for pursuing CDM projects; and third, under fluctuating regulatory regimes with real immediate costs and uncertain CDM revenue, managers favored projects that often did not require carbon revenue to be viable. The post-2012 CDM architecture can benefit from incorporating these insights, and in particular reassess goals for strict additionality and mechanisms for achieving it.

Abstract While policy experiments targeted at energy and innovation transitions have not been deployed consistently across all countries, market mechanisms such as carbon pricing have been tested over the past decade in disparate development contexts, and therefore provide some opportunities for analysis. This brief communication reports on two parallel workshops recently held in Sao Paulo, Brazil and New Delhi, India to address questions of how well these carbon pricing policies have worked in affecting corporate decisions to invest in low-carbon technology. Convening practitioners and scholars from multiple countries, the workshops elicited participants' perspectives on business investment decisions under international carbon markets in emerging economies across multiple energy-intensive sectors. We review the resulting perspectives on low-carbon policies and present guidance on a research agenda that could clarify how international and national policies could help encourage both energy transitions and energy innovations in emerging economies.

The perspectives of developing-country firms are missing from the policy literature on carbon markets. This research addresses this gap by analysing participation in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by sugar mills in Brazil. Specifically, the research documents how far the CDM has penetrated into Brazil's sugar sector; how sugar mill owners/managers perceive the benefits, risks and costs of CDM-related investments; and the processes by which Brazilian sugar mills entered the carbon market. The mill-level analysis of CDM participation reveals the market and non-market dynamics that drive patterns of sugar mill investment in carbon abatement. First, access to a trusted source of information was a key driver of initial CDM participation by sugar mills, alongside other market drivers such as revenue, cost and reputation concerns. Firms with pre-existing relationships with carbon industry experts were more willing to assume the risk of carbon market participation and were in a much better position to capt...

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Scenario analysis, an approach to thinking about alternative futures based on storyline-driven modeling, has become increasingly common and important in attempts to understand and respond to the impacts of human activities on natural systems at a variety of scales. The construction of scenarios is a fundamentally social activity, yet social scientific perspectives have rarely been brought to bear on it. Indeed, there is a growing imbalance between the increasing technical sophistication of the modeling elements of scenarios and the continued simplicity of our understanding of the social origins, linkages, and implications of the narratives to which they are coupled. Drawing on conceptual and methodological tools from science and technology studies, sociology and political science, we offer an overview of what a social scientific analysis of scenarios might include. In particular, we explore both how scenarios intervene in social microscale and macroscale contexts and how aspects of such contexts are embedded in scenarios, often implicitly. Analyzing the social ‘work’ of scenarios (i) can enhance the understanding of scenario developers and modeling practitioners of the knowledge production processes in which they participate and (ii) can improve the utility of scenario products as decision-support tools to actual, rather than imagined, decision-makers.