Emissions distribution in post-Kyoto international negotiations: A policy perspective

An abundant scientific literature about climate change economics points out that the future participation of developing countries in international environmental policies will depend on their amount of pay offs inside and outside specific agreements. Though these contributions represent a corner stone in the research field investigating future plausible international coalitions and the reasons behind the difficulties incurred over time to implement emissions stabilizing actions, they cannot disentangle satisfactorily the role that equality plays in inducing poor regions to tackle global warming. Scholars recently outline that a perceived fairness in the distribution of emissions would facilitate a wide spread participation in international agreements. In this chapter the authors overview the literature about distributional aspects of emissions by focusing on those contributions investigating past trends of emissions distribution through empirical data and future trajectories through simulations obtained by integrated assessment models. They will explain methodologies used to elaborate data and the link between "real data" and those coming from simulations. A particular attention will be devoted to the role that technological change will play in affecting the distribution of emissions over time and to how spillovers and experience diffusion could influence equality issues and future outcomes of policy negotiations. © 2010, IGI Global.