While trade exacerbates climate change, it is also a central part of the solution because it has the potential to enhance mitigation and adaptation. This timely report explores the different ways in which trade and climate change intersect. Trade contributes to the emissions that cause global warming and is itself also affected by climate change through changing comparative advantages. The report also confronts several myths concerning trade and climate change. The Trade and Climate Change Nexus: The Urgency and Opportunities for Developing Countries focuses on the impacts of, and adjustments to, climate change in developing countries and on how future trade opportunities will be affected by both the changing climate and the policy responses to address it. The report discusses how trade can provide the goods and services that drive mitigation and adaptation. It also addresses how climate change creates immense challenges for developing countries, but also new opportunities to promote trade diversification in the transition to a low-carbon world. Suitable trade and environmental policies can offer effective economic incentives to attain both sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

NAFTA remains a centerpiece of US trade-policy debate, but its provisions have sacrificed environmental concerns for the sake of trade liberalization. This timely volume analyzes the national policies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The authors explain how the competing priorities of province, state, or government agendas can slow coordination measures to curtail emissions throughout North America. But, North American cooperation could serve as a model for how developed and developing countries can mutually benefit from an international climate change agreement. Emission reduction is now inextricably linked with trade and finance measures in this post-Kyoto era. The authors argue that the three NAFTA partners can work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while mitigating concerns about trade competitiveness. NAFTA and Climate Change provides a critical assessment of how NAFTA initiatives will contribute to the achievement of important climate-change goals at both regional and global levels. This thorough investigation advances potential solutions, and ideas to develop practical channels for transferring technical and financial assistance from developed to developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and further economic development.

Brookings Trade Forum provides comprehensive analysis on current and emerging issues of international trade and macroeconomics. Practitioners and academics contribute to each volume, with papers that provide an in-depth look at a particular topic. The 2008/2009 edition focuses on climate policy and its impact on trade. Contents include • Five "Gs": Lessons for Governing Global Climate from World Trade William Antholis (Brookings) • International Trade Law and the Economics of Climate Policy: Evaluating the Legality and Effectiveness of Proposals to Address Competitiveness and Leakage Concerns Jason E. Bordoff (Brookings) • Technology Transfers and Climate Change: International Flows, Barriers, and Frameworks Thomas L. Brewer (Georgetown University) •Addressing the Leakage / Competitiveness Issue in Climate Change Policy Proposals Jeffrey A. Frankel (Harvard University) • The Economic and Environmental Effects of Border Tax Adjustments for Climate Policy Warwick J. Mckibbin and Peter J.Wilcoxen (Brookings) • The Climate Commons and a Global Environment Organization (GEO) C. Ford Runge (University of Minnesota)

Climate change remains a global challenge requiring international collaborative action. Another area where countries have successfully committed to a long-term multilateral resolution is the liberalization of international trade. Integration into the world economy has proven a powerful means for countries to promote economic growth, development, and poverty reduction. The broad objectives of the betterment of current and future human welfare are shared by both global trade and climate regimes. Yet both climate and trade agendas have evolved largely independently through the years, despite their mutually supporting objectives. Since global emission goals and global trade objectives are shared policy objectives of most countries, and nearly all of the World Bank's clients, it makes sense to consider the two sets of objectives together. This book is one of the first comprehensive attempts to look at the synergies between climate change and trade objectives from economic, legal, and institutional perspectives. It addresses an important policy question - how changes in trade policies and international cooperation on trade policies can help address global environmental spillovers, especially GHG emissions, and what the (potential) effects of (national) environmental policies that are aimed at global environmental problems might be for trade and investment. It explores opportunities for aligning development and energy policies in such a way that they could stimulate production, trade, and investment in cleaner technology options.

Climate change threatens all people, but its adverse effects will be felt most acutely by the world's poor. Absent urgent action, new threats to food security, public health, and other societal needs may reverse hard-fought human development gains. Climate Change and Global Poverty makes concrete recommendations to integrate international development and climate protection strategies. It demonstrates that effective climate solutions must empower global development, while poverty alleviation itself must become a central strategy for both mitigating emissions and reducing global vulnerability to adverse climate impacts.

Why the traditional “pledge and review” climate agreements have failed, and how carbon pricing, based on trust and reciprocity, could succeed. After twenty-five years of failure, climate negotiations continue to use a “pledge and review” approach: countries pledge (almost anything), subject to (unenforced) review. This approach ignores everything we know about human cooperation. In this book, leading economists describe an alternate model for climate agreements, drawing on the work of the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and others. They show that a “common commitment” scheme is more effective than an “individual commitment” scheme; the latter depends on altruism while the former involves reciprocity (“we will if you will”). The contributors propose that global carbon pricing is the best candidate for a reciprocal common commitment in climate negotiations. Each country would commit to placing charges on carbon emissions sufficient to match an agreed global price formula. The contributors show that carbon pricing would facilitate negotiations and enforcement, improve efficiency and flexibility, and make other climate policies more effective. Additionally, they analyze the failings of the 2015 Paris climate conference. Contributors Richard N. Cooper, Peter Cramton, Ottmar Edenhofer, Christian Gollier, Éloi Laurent, David JC MacKay, William Nordhaus, Axel Ockenfels, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Steven Stoft, Jean Tirole, Martin L. Weitzman

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.