Woods Hole Research Center

Public Policy and Economics

Linking Climate Policy with Development Strategy:
"Win-Win" Options for Brazil, China, and India

The Woods Hole Research Center collaborated 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 other development goals.

This effort combined cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the science, technology, and economics of climate-change mitigation with the practical understandings of national opinion leaders and decision makers, to highlight successes already achieved in "win-win" approaches that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at the same time as they addressed other societal objectives, to scale up those successes, and to identify, develop, and promote other options having this "win-win" character.

The "win-win" options pursued in the project included (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 included, 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.

The full report is available here.

Summaries of journal articles, papers, and websites intended as background information for each of the three project areas are presented here in pdf format.

Brazil

Compensation for Avoiding Deforestation in Brazil. Brazil article summary with abstracts.

Alencar A, D Nepstad, M del Carmen Vera Diaz. 2005. Forest understory fire in the Brazilian Amazon in ENSO and non-ENSO years: area burned and committed carbon emissions. Earth Interactions, 10(2006). 1-17.

Moutinho P, M Santilli, S Schwartzman, L Rodrigues. 2005. Why ignore tropical deforestation? A proposal for including forest conservation in the Kyoto Protocol. Unasylva, 222(56). 27-30.

Moutinho P and S Schwartzman. 2005. Tropical deforestation and climate change. Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia and Environmental Defense.

Nepstad D, C Stickler, OT Almeida. In press. Globalization of the Amazon soy and beef industries: opportunities for conservation. Conservation Biology.

Nepstad D, S Schwartzman, B Bamberger, M Santilli, D Ray, P Schlesinger, P Lefebvre, A Alencar, E Prinz, G Fiske, A Rolla. 2006. Inhibition of Amazon deforestation and fire by parks and indigenous lands. Conservation Biology, 20(1). 65-73.

Santilli M, P Moutinho, S Schwartzman, D Nepstad, L Curran, C Nobre. 2005. Tropical deforestation and the Kyoto Protocol: an editorial essay. Climatic Change, 71. 267-276.

Santilli M, P Moutinho, S Schwartzman, D Nepstad, L Curran, C Nobre. In press. Compensated reductions: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by slowing tropical deforestation. Climate Change.

Soares-Filho BS, DC Nepstad, LM Curran, GC Cerqueira, RA Garcia, CA Ramos, E Voll, A McDonald, P Lefebvre, P Schlesinger. 2006. Modeling conservation in the Amazon basin. Nature, 440. 520-523.

China

Clean Coal and Automotive Transport: Technologies and Opportunities For Carbon Mitigation and Sustainable Development in China. China article summary with abstracts.

Aunan K, J Fang, H Vennemo, K Oye, HM Seip. 2004. Co-benefits of climate policy—lessons learned from a study in Shanxi, China. Energy Policy, 32(2004). 567-581.

Gallagher KS. 2006. Roundtable on barriers and incentives for hybrid vehicles in China. Roundtable organized by the Energy Technology Innovation Project of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the China Automotive Technology and Research Center. 19 May 2006.

Gallagher KS, JP Holdren, AD Sagar. 2006. Energy-technology-innovation. Annual Review of Environmental Resources, 31. 193-237.

He K, H Huo, Q Zhang, D He, F An, M Wang, M Walsh. 2005. Oil consumption and CO2 emissions in China’s road transport: current status, future trends, and policy implications. Energy Policy, 33(2005). 1499-1507.

Holdren JP. 2006. The energy innovation imperative: addressing oil dependence, climate change, and other 21st century energy challenges. Innovations, spring 2006. MIT Press.

Wang X and KR Smith. 1999b. Near-term health benefits of greenhouse gas reductions: a proposed assessment method and application to two energy sectors of China. WHO/SDE/PHE/99-01. World Health Organization, Geneva.