Linking Climate Policy With Development Strategy:"Win-Win"Options For Brazil, China, And India

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in Brazil, China, And India

An international project led by The Woods Hole Research Center
and funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Principal Investigator - John P. Holdren
Director, The Woods Hole Research Center
and Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, Harvard University

The Woods Hole Research Center is collaborating with the Energy Technology Innovation Project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and with participating organizations in the three focus countries to identify, analyze, and promote high-leverage policies for simultaneously reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and advancing development goals.

This effort combines cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the science, technology, and economics of climate-change mitigation with the understandings of national opinion leaders and decision makers, to identify co-benefits of high leverage approaches that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at the same time as they address other societal objectives, to scale up those successes, and to identify, develop, and promote other options having providing further co-benefits.

The "win-win" options currently being pursued in the project are (pdf documents will open in a new window):

for Brazil, compensation for avoided deforestation (with "wins" beyond climate-change mitigation in the water-management, biodiversity preservation, and sustainable community-forestry benefits of intact tropical forests);

for China, clean-coal technologies and clean and efficient motor vehicles (with the additional "wins" in reduction of health damages from conventional air pollution and in reduced oil-import dependence); and

for India, biomass gasification for heat and power, improved cookstoves for household and institutional cooking, improved coal-based power generation, and end-use energy efficiency (additional "wins" in reduction of health damages from indoor and outdoor air pollution, enhanced energy security, and biomass-energy-based regional economic development).

Collaborating organizations include, among others, in Brazil, the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Amazonian Institute for Environmental Research); in China, the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, and the Institute of Thermoengineering Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and in India, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi.