10-10-19 Note d'étude Copenhague ENG

No. 24 • October 2010 CANCÚN: YEAR ONE OF THE POST-COPENHAGEN ERA 1 2 3Henri Casella , Anaïs Delbosc and Christian de Perthuis Co-ordinating climate change policies on a worldwide basis is expected to solve a problem that is well known to economists, namely that of protecting a “common asset”, or climate stability in this instance. Protecting this asset implies a drastic reduction in total global greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of an international agreement, it is in every country’s interest that this reduction effort should be borne by other countries. Conversely, if a group of countries commit themselves on a unilateral basis, their efforts can be offset in the long term by the behaviour of other countries that are not bound by any commitment. The Kyoto Protocol attempted to introduce this type of collaborative mechanism through a co-ordinated system of caps on greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries. The scarcity of emission rights was meant to encourage the emergence of an international carbon price, giving countries an incentive to engage in a co-operative exchange and lowering the cost of emission reductions. The challenge of the Copenhagen Summit was to determine the rules for the post-Kyoto period between 2013 and 2020. While many were hoping for a broadening of commitments within the framework of the rules established by the Protocol, the agreement signed in Copenhagen, under pressure from the major emerging ...