JRC-Ispra Atmosphere-Biosphere-Climate Integrated monitoring Station 2012 report

The Institute for Environment and Sustainability provide long-term observations of the atmosphere within international programs and research projects. These observations are performed from the research infrastructure named ABC-IS: Atmosphere – Biosphere – Climate Integrated monitoring station. Most measurements are performed at the JRC-Ispra site. Observations are also carried out from two other platforms: the forest station in San Rossore, and a ship cruising in the Western Mediterranean sea. This document reports about measurement programs, the equipment which is deployed, the data quality assessment, and the results obtained for each site. Our observations are presented, compared to each other, as well as to historical data obtained over more than 25 years at the Ispra siteJRC.H.2-Air and Climat

JRC – Ispra Atmosphere – Biosphere – Climate Integrated monitoring Station : 2011 report

The Institute for Environment and Sustainability provide long-term observations of the atmosphere within international programs and research projects. These observations are performed from the research infrastructure named ABC-IS: Atmosphere-Biosphere-Climate Integrated monitoring station. Most measurements are performed at the JRC-Ispra site. Observations are also carried out from two other platforms: the forest station in San Rossore, and a ship cruising in the Western Mediterranean sea. This document reports about measurement programs, the equipment which is deployed, and the data quality assessment for each site. Our observations are presented, compared to each other, as well as to historical data obtained over the past 25 years at the Ispra site.JRC.H.2-Air and Climat

Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation

This paper describes an ISO project developing an international standard for annotating dialogue with semantic information, in particular concerning the communicative functions of the utterances, the kind of content they address, and the dependency relations to what was said and done earlier in the dialogue. The project, registered as ISO 24617-2 Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts”, is currently at DIS stage. 1

The SUMMA Platform Prototype

We present the first prototype of the SUMMA Platform: an integrated platform for multilingual media monitoring. The platform contains a rich suite of low-level and high-level natural language processing technologies: automatic speech recognition of broadcast media, machine translation, automated tagging and classification of named entities, semantic parsing to detect relationships between entities, and automatic construction / augmentation of factual knowledge bases. Implemented on the Docker platform, it can easily be deployed, customised, and scaled to large volumes of incoming media streams

The Durban Train: A Ten-Year Delay for the Planet?

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Climate Finance in the European Union: Domestic and International Challenges

This contribution focuses on the most important policies, pathways and challenges involved in the EU’s domestic and international climate finance efforts. Domestically, a key challenge is to find the ‘right’ incentives to mobilize public and private finance, ranging from market mechanisms (the EU ETS), to investment choices made on the basis of voluntary agreements, efforts to change consumption patterns (e.g. eco-labelling), subsidies, taxation, command-and-control, and budget mainstreaming (non-ETS). Internationally, one of the obstacles is the absence of a commonly agreed definition of ‘new and additional resources’, and related accounting and transparency issues. In the EU, much is expected from a mix of well-crafted policies and increased public finance, which would be able to catalyze private investment as the central pathway of the (domestic and global) low-carbon transition.status: publishe

Governing EU-Asia Climate Relations

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The Socialization Potential of the Clean Development Mechanism in EU-China and EU-Vietnam Climate Relations

This PhD thesis studies the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in EU-China and EU-Vietnam climate relations. More specifically, it hypothesizes that the CDM's material incentives, provided through the sale of Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) to the EU, result in the socialization of China and Vietnam in economic development-oriented climate change norms. Climate change norms, or normative sensitivities to actions that reduce, avoid or offset GHG emissions (mitigation), are understood in this thesis in a "liberal environmentalist" way. Liberal environmentalism predicates environmental protection on the maintenance of a liberal economic order.In the theoretical literature, socialization is defined as a "process by which states internalize norms originating elsewhere in the international system", while a norm is as "a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity". It is argued that the CDM has resulted in a discernible socialization effect in the case of China, and shows that material incentives also have a strong potential to induce socialization in Vietnam. As a market-based mechanism, the CDM's material incentives potentially induce a process that involves the activities of norm entrepeneurs combined with the legal institutionalization of the norm, leading, over time, to habit formation that is strongly suggestive of socialization. Four phases can be identified in this process, namely (1) initiation, (2) improvement, (3) consolidation and (4) habit formation. In China, the empirical observations match all four phases of the theoretically predicted pattern, while in Vietnam, the evidence matches the predictions of at least the first three phases, and indicate that there is a strong potential for future habit formation (phase four) as well. Methodologically, the case study method allows, first, to take the context of both cases into account, and, second, to make cross-case comparisons. The thesis fully exploits these benefits by including two chapters on the case with the largest history and additional factors (China) and a chapter that analyzes the historical and contemporary context of EU climate policy and related climate finance pathways, in addition to the two central empirical chapters on China and Vietnam. In the conclusion, several scope conditions are identified, which indicate to what other emerging economies the findings can plausibly be generalized. The central scope condition relates to the state of the political economy of a country. The higher the general levels of economic and institutional development, the higher the chances are for material incentives to lead to norm internalization. Two secondary or related scope conditions include the type of implementing agency and the extent of foreign involvement in the set-up of the policies. There is also one preliminar condition, namely the pre-existence of a basic, shared understanding of the norm.In short, the thesis contributes to both the theoretical and empirical literature on socialization and the CDM, and is very relevant to the development of climate policy in view of the importance of future global climate finance flows.status: publishe

The Socialization Potential of Carbon Markets: Insights from China and the EU

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The Role and Dynamics of the Clean Development Mechanism in EU-Vietnam Climate Relations

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