Opening a policy window for organisational change and full-cost accounting: The creation of BC Hydro's water use planning program

British Columbia's Water Use Planning (WUP) program is a multi-stakeholder process that revises the operating plans of BC Hydro's hydroelectric facilities in order to consider water values beyond hydropower. Using a model of policy change, this paper analyses the circumstances that enabled the emergence of WUP and prompted BC Hydro to change its decision-making processes to better consider environmental and social concerns.External factors, including dam operations' ecological impacts, an imprecise regulatory environment, and worsening relationships with regulators, highlighted the need for a change in operating BC Hydro facilities. Factors internal to BC Hydro included the development of a business case, concerns regarding the utility's reputation and public expectations. While different approaches were explored for solving BC Hydro's problems, a policy window for change opened within a shifting context provided by the election of a more progressive government, the growth of the environmental movement, and new approaches to taking complex multi-stakeholder, multiple resource decisions. Following a successful pilot process and government direction to expand WUP, factors that enabled its institutionalisation included financial resources to compensate for the foregone power, the presence of visionary individuals, the background preparation that facilitated a successful pilot WUP, and the urgent need of a solution.     

International support of climate change policies in developing countries: Strategic, moral and fairness aspects

International transfers in climate policy channeled from the industrialized to the developing world either support the mitigation of climate change or the adaptation to global warming. From a purely allocative point of view, transfers supporting mitigation tend to be Pareto-improving whereas this is not very likely in the case of adaptation support. We illustrate this by regarding transfer schemes currently applied under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto framework.However, if we enrich the analysis by integrating distributional aspects, we find that international adaptation funding may help both the developing and developed world. Interestingly this is not due to altruistic incentives, but due to follow-up effects on international negotiations on climate change mitigation. We argue that the lack of fairness perceived by developing countries in the international climate policy arena can be reduced by the support of adaptation in these countries. As we show - taking into account different fairness concepts - this might raise the prospects of success in international negotiations on climate change. Yet, we find that the influence of transfers may induce different fairness effects on climate change mitigation negotiations to run counter.We discuss whether current transfer schemes under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto framework adequately serve the distributive and allocative objectives pursued in international climate policy.     

Responding to climate and other change processes in complex contexts:: Challenges facing development of adaptive policy frameworks in the Ganga Basin

The Ganga Basin, one of the world's most densely populated and vulnerable regions, is also among the world's most dynamic hydrological systems. Rivers exiting the Himalaya deposit massive amounts of sediment in the plains and shift their courses regularly. The natural dynamics of this system have a direct impact on populations. On August 18th, 2008, for example, embankments on the Kosi River (a tributary to the Ganges), failed and the channel shifted by as much as 120 km (Sinha, 2008 [1]) displacing over sixty thousand people in Nepal and three and a half million in India. Transport and power systems disrupted across large areas. The embankment failure was not caused by an extreme event. Instead the breach represented a failure of interlinked physical and institutional infrastructure systems in an area characterized by complex social, political, and environmental relationships.Projected climate changes in the Ganga Basin are likely to greatly exacerbate vulnerability (Adaptation Study Team, 2008 [2]). While the Kosi breach had nothing to do with climate change, such events will increase if climatic variability, sediment transport, and extreme events increase. Understanding how populations can respond to the dynamic nature of rivers such as the Kosi is, as a result, essential to develop strategies for adapting to climatic change. Understanding is also essential at the policy level for building adaptive capacity. The challenge is to identify policy frameworks and their relationship to interlinked physical and institutional infrastructure combinations that create environments enabling adaptation within households, communities, and regions.This paper explores the challenges and opportunities facing the development of adaptive policy frameworks in the Ganga Basin. The characteristics of frameworks that are adaptive in themselves and enable adaptation along with their relationship to different types of interlinked institutional and infrastructure systems are explored first. Following this, the case of the Kosi embankment along with the projected impacts of climate change across the Ganga Basin is used to identify the key challenges and opportunities that are common in many regions. The paper concludes with specific observations on the development of adaptive policy frameworks for responding to climate change in complex developing country contexts.     

Reducing climate change impacts on agriculture: Global and regional effects of mitigation, 2000–2080

What are the implications for agriculture of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions? By when and by how much are impacts reduced? Where does it matter most? We investigated these questions within the new A2 emission scenario, recently developed at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis with revised population and gross domestic product projections. Coupling an agro-ecological model to a global food trade model, two distinct sets of climate simulations were analyzed: 1) A non-mitigated scenario, with atmospheric CO₂ concentrations over 800 ppm by 2100; and 2) A mitigation scenario, with CO₂ concentrations stabilized at 550 ppm by 2100. Impacts of climate change on crop yield were evaluated for the period 1990–2080, then used as input for economic analyses. Key trends were computed over the 21st century for food demand, production and trade, focusing on potential monetary (aggregate value added) and human (risk of hunger) impacts. The results from this study suggested that mitigation could positively impact agriculture. With mitigation, global costs of climate change, though relatively small in absolute amounts, were reduced by 75–100%; and the number of additional people at risk of malnutrition was reduced by 80–95%. Significant geographic and temporal differences were found. Regional effects often diverged from global net results, with some regions worse off under mitigation compared to the unmitigated case.