New Report Links Effective Climate Policies with Development Strategies in Brazil, China, and India.

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As part of a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Woods Hole Research Center has released a study entitled Linking Climate Policy with Development Strategy in Brazil, China, and India. The report addresses opportunities for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in three emerging economies – Brazil, China, and India -- in ways that complement economic development and human well-being goals. (See more information on this study »)

In brief, the study emphasizes the following:

In Brazil our study indicates that carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation (the largest or second largest source of such emissions in the world, depending on year) could be reduced to close to zero over a 10-yr time horizon at a cost between $100 million and $600 million per year.

Managing emissions from coal in China will entail strengthening relevant policies, and that will not be enough to reduce absolute greenhouse-gas emissions in the face of the overall expected electricity growth. China’s passenger vehicle sector also presents enormous challenges: despite projected new standards the absolute increase would still be more than a doubling by 2020.

India’s emissions could be reduced through improvements in coal-power-generation efficiency; reductions in large T&D losses; and electricity-saving programs in agricultural pumping, lighting, and solar water heating. Biomass gasifier technologies together with advanced biomass-cooking technologies, could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by about 18% of India’s projected annual emissions in 2025.: this potential has not been widely recognized in the climate-change literature.

According to John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Center and the lead investigator on the Hewlett project, “The costs and benefits of climate-change mitigation is inherently a complicated matter, made more so by the desirability of including benefits not easily translated into monetary terms. Our analysis and preliminary work with policy makers clearly argues that despite strong concern about climate change, in these countries development goals are the primary drivers of political action and mitigation options that do not speak to development goals are unlikely to gain traction and change policy.”

The definition and valuation of co-benefits in the Center’s work recommends using the methods and metrics that have been established for these purposes by the major international collaborative assessments, such as the IPCC, the Millennium Development Goals project of the United Nations, the 2001 Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (whose recommendations have been adopted by the World Health Organization and the World Bank, and the 2004 World Health Organization Comparative Risk Assessment). These methods and metrics represent a consensus of world expert opinion on how best to navigate through the complexity of such analyses.

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.