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Water, Air, and Soil Pollution: Focus Vol.7 Nr.4 - 5, 529 - 538 ; Emissions trading in the European Union (EU), covering the least uncertain emission sources of greenhouse gas emission inventories (CO2 from combustion and selected industrial processes in large installations), began in 2005. During the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012), the emissions trading between Parties to the Protocol will cover all greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6) and sectors (energy, industry, agriculture, waste, and selected land-use activities) included in the Protocol. In this paper, we estimate the uncertainties in different emissions trading schemes based on uncertainties in corresponding inventories. According to the results, uncertainty in emissions from the EU15 and the EU25 included in the first phase of the EU emissions trading scheme (2005-2007) is ±3% (at 95% confidence interval relative to the mean value). If the trading were extended to CH4 and N2O, in addition to CO2, but no new emissions sectors were included, the tradable amount of emissions would increase by only 2% and the uncertainty in the emissions would range from -4 to +8%. Finally, uncertainty in emissions included in emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol was estimated to vary from -6 to +21%. Inclusion of removals from forest-related activities under the Kyoto Protocol did not notably affect uncertainty, as the volume of these removals is estimated to be small.

VTT Publications 603 ; The waste sector is an important contributor to climate change. CH4 produced at solid waste disposal sites contributes approximately 3-4 percent to the annual global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions from solid waste disposal are expected to increase with increasing global population and GDP. On the other hand, many cost-efficient emission reduction options are available. The rate of waste degradation in landfills depends on waste composition, climate and conditions in the landfill. Because the duration of CH4 generation is several decades, estimation of emissions from landfills requires modelling of waste disposal prior to the year whose emissions are of interest. In this study, country- or region-specific first-order decay (FOD) models based on the 2006 IPCC Guidelines are used to estimate emissions from municipal solid waste disposal in landfills. In addition, IPCC methodology is used to estimate emissions from waste incineration. Five global scenarios are compiled from 1990 to 2050. These scenarios take into account political decision making and changes in the waste management system. In the Baseline scenario, waste generation is assumed to follow past and current trends using population and GDP as drivers. In the other scenarios, effects of increased incineration, increased recycling and increased landfill gas recovery on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are assessed. Economic maximum emission reduction potentials for these waste management options are estimated at different marginal cost levels for the year 2030 by using the Global TIMES model. Global emissions from landfills are projected to increase from 340 Tg CO2 eq in 1990 to 1500 Tg CO2 eq by 2030 and 2900 Tg CO2 eq by 2050 in the Baseline scenario. The emission reduction scenarios give emissions reductions from 5% (9%) to 21% (27%) compared to the Baseline in 2030 (2050). As each scenario considered one mitigation option, the results are largely additive, and the total mitigation potential can be assumed to be up to 30% in 2030 and 50% in 2050.The most favourable mitigation scenario was High landfill gas recovery scenario where increased rates of landfill gas recovery were assumed in developed and developing countries. In developing countries CDM type activities have appeared to be favourable mechanisms to stimulate this development. Due to the time lag in the emissions from landfills, the impact of increased recycling and incineration in mitigating the emissions from the waste sector is seen more slowly than that of landfill gas recovery. According to the calculations of economic potentials, one third of global CH4 emissions from landfills could be reduced at zero to negative costs in 2030. Below 10-20 USD/t CO2 eq, more than half of the emissions could be reduced. The economic maximum potential would be approximately 75% in 2030 when compared with the Baseline, but due to the time lag between waste disposal and emissions, this would be reached only if measures with very high marginal cost levels could be implemented in 2010. These assessments of potentials based on specific assumptions are appropriate for generalized global comparisons; however, more accurate assessment of the potentials would need more detailed consideration of regional and local conditions.

Climate change is widely recognised as a 'wicked' policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EU-level policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence-based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term.

The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) compiles anthropogenic emissions data for greenhouse gases (GHGs), and for multiple air pollutants, based on international statistics and emission factors. EDGAR data provide quantitative support for atmospheric modelling and for mitigation scenario and impact assessment analyses as well as for policy evaluation. The new version (v4.3.2) of the EDGAR emission inventory provides global estimates, broken down to IPCC-relevant source-sector levels, from 1970 (the year of the European Union's first Air Quality Directive) to 2012 (the end year of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, KP). Strengths of EDGAR v4.3.2 include global geo-coverage (226 countries), continuity in time, and comprehensiveness in activities. Emissions of multiple chemical compounds, GHGs as well as air pollutants, from relevant sources (fossil fuel activities but also, for example, fermentation processes in agricultural activities) are compiled following a bottom-up (BU), transparent and IPCC-compliant methodology. This paper describes EDGAR v4.3.2 developments with respect to three major long-lived GHGs (HYDRO, CH 4 , and HYDRO) derived from a wide range of human activities apart from the land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector and apart from savannah burning; a companion paper quantifies and discusses emissions of air pollutants. Detailed information is included for each of the IPCC-relevant source sectors, leading to global totals for 2010 (in the middle of the first KP commitment period) (with a 95% confidence interval in parentheses): HYDRO PgCO HYDRO yr HYDRO, HYDRO PgCH HYDRO yr HYDRO, and HYDRO TgN HYDRO Oyr HYDRO. We provide uncertainty factors in emissions data for the different GHGs and for three different groups of countries: OECD countries of 1990, countries with economies in transition in 1990, and the remaining countries in development (the UNFCCC non-Annex I parties). We document trends for the major emitting countries together with the European Union in more for each source sector.