Consumption-based carbon accounting: does it have a future?

Internationally, allocation of responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is currently based on the production-based (PB) accounting method, which measures emissions generated in the place where goods and services are produced. However, the growth of emissions embodied in trade has raised the question whether we should switch to, or amalgamate PB accounting, with other accounting approaches. Consumption-based (CB) accounting has so far emerged as the most prominent alternative. This approach accounts for emissions at the point of consumption, attributing all the emissions that occurred in the course of production and distribution to the final consumers of goods and services. This review has a fourfold objective. First, it provides an account of the logic behind attributing responsibility for emissions on the basis of consumption instead of production. Issues of equity and justice, increased emissions coverage, encouragement of cleaner production practices, and political benefits are considered. Second, it discusses the counterarguments, focusing in particular on issues of technical complexity, mitigation effectiveness, and political acceptability. Third, it presents the spectrum of implementation possibilities—ranging from the status quo to more transformative options—and considers the implications for international climate policy that would accrue under various scenarios of adopting CB accounting in practice. Fourth, it looks at how CB accounting may be adjusted to fit with current political realities and it identifies policy mechanisms that could potentially be utilized to directly or indirectly address CB emissions. Such an approach could unlock new opportunities for climate policy innovation and for climate mitigation

Summary for policymakers

The Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGIII AR5) provides a comprehensive assessment of all relevant options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as activities that remove them from the atmosphere. It draws on scientific literature accepted for publication prior to 4 October 2013. The WGIII Summary for Policymakers was approved at the Twelfth Session of Working Group III, held in Berlin, Germany, from 7 to 11 April, 2014. During the session, the IPCC plenary also accepted the underlying scientific and technical assessment, which stands at 2000 pages, including more than 700 pages of references

Technical summary

The Working Group III (WGIII) contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. It builds upon the WGIII contribution to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) and previous reports and incorporates subsequent new findings and research. Throughout, the focus is on the implications of its findings for policy, without being prescriptive about the particular policies that governments and other important participants in the policy process should adopt. In light of the IPCC's mandate, authors in WGIII were guided by several principles when assembling this assessment: (1) to be explicit about mitigation options, (2) to be explicit about their costs and about their risks and opportunities vis-a-vis other development priorities, (3) and to be explicit about the underlying criteria, concepts, and methods for evaluating alternative policies. This summary offers the main findings of the report

Community-based management induces rapid recovery of a high-value tropical freshwater fishery

Tropical wetlands are highly threatened socio-ecological systems, where local communities rely heavily on aquatic animal protein, such as fish, to meet food security. Here, we quantify how a ‘win-win’ community-based resource management program induced stock recovery of the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish (Arapaima gigas), providing both food and income. We analyzed stock assessment data over eight years and examined the effects of protected areas, community-based management, and landscape and limnological variables across 83 oxbow lakes monitored along a ~500-km section of the Juruá River of Western Brazilian Amazonia. Patterns of community management explained 71.8% of the variation in arapaima population sizes. Annual population counts showed that protected lakes on average contained 304.8 (±332.5) arapaimas, compared to only 9.2 (±9.8) in open-access lakes. Protected lakes have become analogous to a high-interest savings account, ensuring an average annual revenue of US$10,601 per community and US$1046.6 per household, greatly improving socioeconomic welfare. Arapaima management is a superb window of opportunity in harmonizing the co-delivery of sustainable resource management and poverty alleviation. We show that arapaima management deserves greater attention from policy makers across Amazonian countries, and highlight the need to include local stakeholders in conservation planning of Amazonian floodplains

The rise of noncommunicable diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean: challenges for public health policies

The health landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean is changing quickly. The region is undergoing a demographic and epidemiological transition in which health problems are highly concentrated on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). In light of this, the region faces two main challenges: (1) develop cost-effective policies to prevent NCD risk factors, and (2) increase access to quality healthcare in a scenario in which a large share of the labor force is employed in the informal sector. This paper describes both alternative interventions to expand health insurance coverage and their trade-off with labor informality and moral hazard problems. The paper also focuses on obesity as a case example of an NCD, and emphasizes how lack of knowledge along with self-control problems would lead people to make suboptimal decisions related to food consumption, which may later manifest in obesity problems.Fil: Anauati, Maria Victoria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de San Andrés; ArgentinaFil: Galiani, Sebastian. University of Maryland; Estados UnidosFil: Weinschelbaum, Federico. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de San Andrés; Argentin

Dissemination of Drinking Water Contamination Data to Consumers: A Systematic Review of Impact on Consumer Behaviors

Drinking water contaminated by chemicals or pathogens is a major public health threat in the developing world. Responses to this threat often require water consumers (households or communities) to improve their own management or treatment of water. One approach hypothesized to increase such positive behaviors is increasing knowledge of the risks of unsafe water through the dissemination of water contamination data. This paper reviews the evidence for this approach in changing behavior and subsequent health outcomes.A systematic review was conducted for studies where results of tests for contaminants in drinking water were disseminated to populations whose water supply posed a known health risk. Studies of any design were included where data were available from a contemporaneous comparison or control group. Using multiple sources >14,000 documents were located. Six studies met inclusion criteria (four of arsenic contamination and two of microbiological contamination). Meta-analysis was not possible in most cases due to heterogeneity of outcomes and study designs. Outcomes included water quality, change of water source, treatment of water, knowledge of contamination, and urinary arsenic. Source switching was most frequently reported: of 5 reporting studies 4 report significantly higher rates of switching (26–72%) among those who received a positive test result and a pooled risk difference was calculate for 2 studies (RD = 0.43 [CI0.4.0–0.46] 6–12 months post intervention) suggesting 43% more of those with unsafe wells switched source compared to those with safe wells. Strength of evidence is low since the comparison is between non-equivalent groups. Two studies concerning fecal contamination reported non-significant increases in point-of-use water treatment.Despite the publication of some large cohort studies and some encouraging results the evidence base to support dissemination of contamination data to improve water management is currently equivocal. Rigorous studies on this topic are needed, ideally using common outcome measures

Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information. We argue that voluntary cooperation enabled across overlapping coalitions (akin to polycentricity) not only facilitates a higher generation of non-excludable public goods, but it may also allow evolution toward a more cooperative, stable, and inclusive approach to governance. Contrary to any previous study, we show that these merits of multi-coalition governance are far more general than the singular examples occurring in the literature, and they are robust under diverse conditions of excludability, congestion of the non-excludable public good, and arbitrary shapes of the return-to-contribution function. We first confirm the intuition that a single coalition without enforcement and with players pursuing their self-interest without knowledge of returns to contribution is prone to cooperative failure. Next, we demonstrate that the same pessimistic model but with a multi-coalition structure of governance experiences relatively higher cooperation by enabling recognition of marginal gains of cooperation in the game at stake. In the absence of enforcement, public-goods regimes that evolve through a proliferation of voluntary cooperative forums can maintain and increase cooperation more successfully than singular, inclusive regimes.Supported by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (D17AC00005), National Science Foundation grant GEO-1211972, and Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through grants PTDC/MAT/STA/3358/2014, PTDC/EEI-SII/5081/2014, and UID/BIA/04050/2013. P.M.H. was supported by the Walbridge Fund at the Princeton Environmental Institute