Suchergebnisse

In the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, China agreed to slash its carbon intensity (carbon dioxide emissions/GDP) by 40% to 45% from the 2005 level by 2020. We assess whether China can achieve the target under the business-as-usual scenario by forecasting its emissions from energy consumption. Our preferred model shows that China's carbon intensity is projected to decline by only 33%. The results imply that China needs additional mitigation effort to comply with the Copenhagen commitment. In addition, China's baseline emissions are projected to increase by 56% in the next decade (2011-2020). The emission growth is more than triple the emission reductions that the European Union and the United States have committed to in the same period.

AbstractWhat decision‐makers in countries want to know from science is more than just an understanding of what is a good and environmentally aware society, or the human dimensions of global change. They also want to know how to achieve comparable levels of human wellbeing keeping within global ecological limits. In the absence of agreed criteria on who has to do what, global cooperation as well as national action now needs new insights for potential policy choices and these could come from Special Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the price decisions and profits of two firms in a competitive market in which one platform firm considers whether to adopt a consumer customization strategy.


Design/methodology/approach
This study develops the consumer's utility function, which captures consumers' behavioural and emotional factors in the self-customizing process, and it adopts a game theory approach to analyze the equilibrium price and equilibrium profit for each firm.


Findings
The results show that increased sensitivity in consumer customization might not benefit the platform, especially when the size of the consumer group deriving positive additional utility from the self-customizing process is small. Interestingly, if the consumer customization sensitivity is high, increasing sensitivity can benefit both firms by relaxing competition between them, while it can hurt consumer surplus. The study also further identifies the conditions under which platforms can adopt a consumer customization strategy.


Research limitations/implications
Two major limitations of the study are that the model does not involve price discrimination or explore the value of adopting a consumer customization strategy in a vertically differentiated market.


Practical implications
This study offers managerial insights for the platforms that intend to invest in a consumer customization strategy, including providing a more simple, more efficient self-customizing process for consumers; empowering consumers to broadcast their creations to a large network by social media technologies; addressing how to determine what consumers really need and want; and so on.


Originality/value
Little research has been performed to analyze the impacts of adopting a consumer customization strategy on pricing decisions in a duopoly market by capturing consumers' behavioural and emotional factors. While this study explores the above research issue, it also illustrates the effect of the adoption of a consumer customization strategy from a consumer surplus perspective.

AbstractThere is a new role for global climate policy and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to support national implementation. For keeping within global ecological limits, public debate has shifted from concerns about the reliability of model‐based climate projections to national legislators considering questions of when, where, and how to modify longer term trends. However, modeling remains the essential scientific tool by which the climate problem is defined assuming that society and the economy can be transformed, actually re‐engineered, with relative ease. Inputs from the IPCC to the new governance process, the global 'stocktake', suggesting solutions will now influence deliberations between stakeholders, national actions and global cooperation. How best to shape a different science architecture and agenda linking science with both policy and society requires, for example, giving as much importance to reports of multilateral bodies and business consultancies as to peer‐reviewed literature. This paper lays out some ideas how legitimacy can be maintained even as the IPCC recommends policy options and not just advice that is policy relevant.

Globally as well as in China, cities have contributed to most of the economic output and have accordingly given rise to most CO2 emissions. In particular, given unprecedented urbanization, cities will play an even greater role in shaping energy demand and CO2 emissions. Therefore, cities are the key to meeting its proposed carbon intensity target in 2020 and whatever climate commitments beyond 2020 that China may take. Given the paramount importance of cities, China is practicing low carbon city (LCC) development. Against this background, this paper first summarizes the general situation and main characteristics of China's LCC development. The paper then identifies eight problems and challenges for China's LCC development including the absence of sound carbon accounting systems, lack of low-carbon specific evaluation system, rare use of market-based instruments, insufficient government-enterprise interactions, excessive budget dependence on land concession, increasing difficulty in further carbon mitigation, inevitable emissions growth due to rising living standards, and coal-dominant energy structure in the foreseeable future. Since these challenges are not applied to one or few cities, but are to all cities across the country, finally, the paper discusses how governments, in particular the central government, should address these problems and challenges. Given that China has faced great difficulty ensuring that local governments act in accordance with centrally-directed policies, the paper in particular discusses ways to incentivize local governments not to focus on economic growth alone and to move away from a heavy reliance on land concession. The paper ends with emphasizing on putting a price on carbon a crucial step for China's endeavor of harnessing the market forces to reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions and genuinely transiting into a low-carbon economy.

This paper discusses environmental complaints made by citizens living close to industrial polluters in China. Data collected from a questionnaire survey in Suzhou City is used for the analysis. The results confirm a marginal level of citizen environmental complaints in the study area at present. Meaningful findings include the fact that citizens have a tendency to complain collectively, and that perception of the level of environmental information provided by companies significantly determines a citizen's likelihood of lodging environmental complaints. Therefore, the disclosure of corporate environmental information must be emphasized continuously; citizens must be encouraged to correctly understand the environmental performance of companies so that they might make appropriate complaints. Governments need to show their support for citizen-led environmental complaint initiatives. The successful cases would convince them to keep a closer eye on their neighbouring polluters.