Putting a price on carbon can be an indispensable part of a country's strategy to reduce emissions in an efficient way. Furthermore, putting a price on carbon through international carbon markets can also offer significant cost benefits and enable flexibility in achieving emission reduction targets. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a potential basis for bottom-up carbon market linkage. Under the Paris Agreement, carbon pricing policies and international carbon markets are increasingly developed bottom up and are diverse in nature to accommodate countries' domestic priorities. While this bottom-up development promotes innovation, the diversity of approaches reduces transparency between climate actions and increases the complexity of market integration. A standardized framework is needed to assess countries' capacity building needs to participate in carbon pricing and international carbon markets. The World Bank initiated the development of the mitigation action assessment protocol (MAAP) in 2015 to drive meaningful assessment of diverse climate actions. Pilots results showed that MAAP provides a transparent and relatively easy-to-use framework to help countries identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. Future implementation of the tool will seek to address identified challenges such as collecting evidence, identifying capacity building priorities, and providing guidance on communication strategies. This report summarizes key findings and lessons learned from pilots.

The promise of harnessing market forces to combat climate change has been unsettled by low carbon prices, financial losses, and ongoing controversies in global carbon markets. And yet governments around the world remain committed to market-based solutions to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. This book discusses what went wrong with the marketisation of climate change and what this means for the future of action on climate change. The book explores the co-production of capitalism and climate change by developing new understandings of relationships between the appropriation, commodification and capitalisation of nature. The book reveals contradictions in carbon markets for addressing climate change as a socio-ecological, economic and political crisis, and points towards more targeted and democratic policies to combat climate change. This book will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers and campaigners who are interested in climate change and climate policy, and the political economy of capitalism and the environment.

This paper considers the regulatory frameworkthat is required to be put in place in order to support theestablishment of carbon market linkages, in particular, in light of the bottom-up approach contemplated by theParis Agreement. Section two describes the key purpose ofthe paper and details the assumptions and other factorsthat are made in this paper concerning "networking"--Aform of linking contemplated by the World Bank Group's Networked Carbon Markets (NCM) initiative. The key assumption in the paper is that the parties seeking to link two or more carbon markets will, before considering theregulatory elements required for linking, have concluded that there must be political, administrative and/oreconomic rationale for linking. Section three considers the impact of the Paris Agreement, in particular Article 6, on carbon market linkage. Section four introduces the concepts of governance, legal and regulatory frameworks and seeks to draw a distinction between these three concepts, whilst recognising there is a degree of overlap. In section five discuss the regulatory framework that we consider to be necessary for carbon market linking when considered in the context of traditional linkage models (i.e., those that require greater homogeneity in order to establish linkages). In section six analyses a number of existing trading arrangements to assess whether they offer a suitable foundation for future linked carbon markets. This would potentially enable existing regulatory frameworks to be used as a means of jump-starting the linkage process. Section seven includes a more detailed discussion of the World Bank Group's proposal for networking and the concept of mitigation value (MV) which is a fundamental element of networking. We consider the variety of modalities for linking, including the networking modeland the NCM transaction scenarios discussed in the NCM Concept Paper. This relates to the acceptance by one country of its MV assessment by a third party assessor. Although we highlight some of the new challenges this will throw up, we conclude that further development about how MV could be operationalised will be required before guidance on the regulatory frameworkfor networking can be further advanced.

Anthropogenic Climate Change is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century and receives more and more international awareness. The central instruments to counter climate change are emissions trading schemes (ETS) to cover GHG emissions. To increase efficiency and to ensure global reduction of emissions damaging to the climate, an international emissions trading scheme would be a rational choice. To establish such a global scheme, political decision makers could follow a bottom-up-approach by linking already existing ETS with each other. The book investigates such linkings of emissions trading schemes, which provide many benefits for the linking partners. As experience shows, although the number of schemes increased in the last decade, only a few linkings were established. Thus, the book answers the question, if and which conditions for states exist to link their emissions trading schemes. .

This book explains why the climate change crisis is a symptom of a much larger underlying problem – namely, humankind’s predilection with continuous GDP-growth. Given this starting point, the world’s high-income nations must begin the transition to a qualitatively-improving steady-state economy and low-income nations must follow suit at some stage over the next 20-40 years. Unless they do, a well-designed emissions protocol will be as useless as the paper it is written on. Adopting an ecological economic approach, this book sets out why we must abandon the goal of continuous growth; how we can do so in a way that improves human well-being; what constitutes a safe atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases; and what type of emissions protocol and emissions-trading framework is likely to achieve a desirable climate change outcome. Failure of the world’s leaders to achieve these goals will not only put future human well-being at risk, it will threaten freedom in the liberal-democratic tradition and international peace.

What are the prospects for averting dangerous climate change and which strategies offer promising avenues to successfully tackle this global challenge? These questions are at the heart of the analysis in this book that begins by evaluating the possibilities and limits of transnational cooperation in climate policy. The book then investigates the normative underpinnings for avoiding dangerous climate change and looks at policy instruments for climate protection. The final section turns to developing an implementation strategy centered on the innovative concept of a Modular Carbon Market as an institutional structure for global emissions management. (Series: Studies on International Environmental Policy / Studien zur Internationalen Umweltpolitik - Vol. 15)