David G. Victor

The Regime Complex for Climate Change

There is no integrated regime governing efforts to limit the extent of climate change. Instead, there is a regime complex: a loosely coupled set of specific regimes. We describe the regime complex for climate change and seek to explain it, using functional, strategic, and organizational arguments. This institutional form is likely to persist; efforts to build a comprehensive regime are unlikely to succeed, but narrower institutions focused on particular aspects of the climate change problem are already thriving. Building on this analysis, we argue that a climate change regime complex, if it meets specified criteria, has advantages over any politically feasible comprehensive regime, particularly with respect to adaptability and flexibility. Adaptability and flexibility are particularly important in a setting, such as climate change policy, in which the most demanding international commitments are interdependent yet governments vary widely in their interest and ability to implement them.

Dynamics of energy technologies and global change

Technological choices largely determine the long-term characteristics of industrial society, including impacts on the natural environment. However, the treatment of technology in existing models that are used to project economic and environmental futures remains highly stylized. Based on work over two decades at IIASA, we present a useful typology for technology analysis and discuss methods that can be used to analyze the impact of technological changes on the global environment, especially global warming. Our focus is energy technologies, the main source of many atmospheric environmental problems. We show that much improved treatment of technology is possible with a combination of historical analysis and new modeling techniques. In the historical record, we identify characteristic &l such network e!ects yield high barriers to entry even for superior competitors. These simple observations allow three improvements to modeling of technological change and its consequences for global environmental change. One is that the replacement of long-lived infrastructures over time has also replaced the fuels that power the economy to yield progressively more energy per unit of carbon pollution } from coal to oil to gas. Such replacement has &d they also include endogenous generation of &s we show that doing so can yield projections with lessened environmental impacts without necessarily incurring negative e!ect on the economy. Arriving on that path by the year 2100 depends on intervening actions, such as incentives to promote greater diversity in technology and lower barriers to entry for new infrastructures that could accelerate historical trends of decarbonization. ( 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The future mobility of the world population

On average a person spends 1.1Â h per day traveling and devotes a predictable fraction of income to travel. We show that these time and money budgets are stable over space and time and can be used for projecting future levels of mobility and transport mode. The fixed travel money budget requires that mobility rises nearly in proportion with income. Covering greater distances within the same fixed travel time budget requires that travelers shift to faster modes of transport. The choice of future transport modes is also constrained by path dependence because transport infrastructures change only slowly. In addition, demand for low-speed public transport is partially determined by urban population densities and land-use characteristics. We present a model that incorporates these constraints, which we use for projecting traffic volume and the share of the major motorized modes of transport--automobiles, buses, trains and high speed transport (mainly aircraft)--for 11 regions and the world through 2050. We project that by 2050 the average world citizen will travel as many kilometers as the average West European in 1990. The average Americans mobility will rise by a factor of 2.6 by 2050, to 58,000 km/year. The average Indian travels 6000Â km/year by 2050, comparable with West European levels in the early 1970s. Today, world citizens move 23 billion km in total; by 2050 that figure grows to 105 billion.

The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources

This article examines the implications of the rising density of international institutions. Despite the rapid proliferation of institutions, scholars continue to embrace the assumption that individual regimes are decomposable from others. We contend that an increasingly common phenomenon is the “regime complex:†a collective of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical regimes. The evolution of regime complexes reflects the influence of legalization on world politics. Regime complexes are laden with legal inconsistencies because the rules in one regime are rarely coordinated closely with overlapping rules in related regimes. Negotiators often attempt to avoid glaring inconsistencies by adopting broad rules that allow for multiple interpretations. In turn, solutions refined through implementation of these rules focus later rounds of negotiation and legalization. We explore these processes using the issue of plant genetic resources (PGR). Over the last century, states have created property rights in these resources in a Demsetzian process: as new technologies and ideas have made PGR far more valuable, actors have mobilized and clashed over the creation of property rights that allow the appropriation of that value.We are grateful for comments on early drafts presented at Stanford Law School, New York University Law School, Duke Law School, Harvard Law School, and the American Society for International Law. Thanks especially to Larry Helfer, Tom Heller, Robert Keohane, Benedict Kingsbury, Peter Lallas, Lisa Martin, Ron Mitchell, Sabrina Safrin, Gene Skolnikoff, Richard Stewart, Chris Stone, Buzz Thompson, Jonathan Wiener, Katrina Wyman, Oran Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Kal Raustiala thanks the Program on Law and Public Affairs at Princeton for support. We also thank our research assistants, Lindsay Carlson, Lesley Coben and Joshua House.

The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming

Preface vii CHAPTER 1 Crisis and Opportunity 3 CHAPTER 2 Kyotos Fantasyland: Allocating the Atmosphere 25 CHAPTER 3 Monitoring and Enforcement 55 CHAPTER 4 Rethinking the Architecture 75 CHAPTER 5 After Kyoto: What Next? 109 APPENDIX The Causes and Effects of Global Warming: A Brief Survey of the Science 117 Notes 123 Works Cited 155 Index 173

Global passenger travel: implications for carbon dioxide emissions

Humans spend, on average, a constant fraction of their time and expenditure on travel. These and a few other constraints allow a new model for projecting regional and world travel, which we use to develop a scenario for carbon emissions from passenger transport. Globally, carbon emissions rise from 0.8 GtC in 1990 to 2.7 GtC in 2050. In every industrialized region aircraft and high-speed trains become the dominant mode; unable to satisfy the rising demand for mobility within a fixed travel time budget, automobile travel declines by 2050. Passenger transport carbon emissions stabilize by 2020 without any further policy intervention. But in developing countries automobile travel is still rising and becomes the dominant source of carbon dioxide from passenger transport. Fear of global warming may require stabilization of these emissions by mid-century. We show that without some action to accelerate an improvement in energy efficiency starting in the next decade, the goal of stabilization is a technically impossible task, unless zero-carbon technologies become available.

Toward Effective International Cooperation on Climate Change: Numbers, Interests and Institutions

Arild Underdals law of the least ambitious program is properly pessimistic about the prospects for cooperation in the international system where nations must give their consent to be bound by meaningful commitments. Those pessimistic expectations are now being revealed in the collective efforts to address the problem of climate change, notably through the Kyoto Protocol. Over-coming Underdals law requires narrowing the numbers of countries that participate in key climate agreements and tailoring membership so that just the most important countries are engaged and there are strong incentives to avoid defection. At the same time, the effectiveness of cooperative efforts would gain from fuller use of nonbinding instruments, review procedures and high level conferencesas were put to effective use in the North Sea cooperation, for example in addition to legally binding international law through instruments such as the Kyoto Protocol. Sadly, most of the conventional wisdom runs the opposite direction, favoring binding treaties among large numbers of countries.

Long-term strategies for mitigating global warming

This special issue reviews technological options for mitigating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The options analyzed include efficiency improvements, renewable energies, clean fossil and zero-carbon energy technologies, carbon sequestration and disposal, enhancement of natural carbon sinks (halting deforestation, afforestation, and other sink enhancement options), and geo-engineering measures to compensate for increases in CO2 concentrations. Reduction potentials, costs, and the relative contribution of individual options, as well as their limiting factors and possible timing of introduction and diffusion, are discussed. The study concludes with a discussion of methodological issues and of trade-offs and constraints for implementation strategies to mitigate anthropogenic sources of change in the global carbon cycle.

Climate policy: Ditch the 2 °C warming goal

COMMENT Ditch the 2 ° C warming goal F or nearly a decade, international diplomacy has focused on stopping global warming at 2 °C above pre- industrial levels. This goal — bold and easy to grasp — has been accepted uncritically and has proved influential. The emissions-mitigation report of the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is framed to address this aim, as is nearly every policy plan to reduce carbon emissions — from California’s to the European Union’s (EU). This month, diplomatic talks will resume to prepare an agreement ahead of a major climate summit in Paris in 2015; again a 2 °C warming limit is the focus. Bold simplicity must now face reality. Politically and scientifically, the 2 °C goal is wrong-headed. Politically, it has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have achieved almost nothing. Scientifically, there are bet- ter ways to measure the stress that humans are placing on the climate system than the growth of average global surface tempera- ture — which has stalled since 1998 and is 3 0 | N A T U R E | V O L 5 1 4 | 2 O cto b er 2 0 1 4 poorly coupled to entities that governments and companies can control directly 1 . Failure to set scientifically meaningful goals makes it hard for scientists and politicians to explain how big investments in climate pro- tection will deliver tangible results. Some of the backlash from ‘denialists’ is partly rooted in policy-makers’ obsession with global tem- peratures that do not actually move in lock- step with the real dangers of climate change. New goals are needed. It is time to track an array of planetary vital signs — such as changes in the ocean heat content — that are better rooted in the scientific understand- ing of climate drivers and risks. Targets must also be set in terms of the many individual gases emitted by human activities and poli- cies to mitigate those emissions. Own goal Actionable goals have proven difficult to articulate from the beginning of climate policy efforts. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) expressed the aim as prevent- ing “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system”. Efforts to clarify the meaning of ‘dangerous’ here have proved fruitless because science offers many differ- ent answers depending on which part of the climate system is under scrutiny, and each country has a different perspective 2 . The 2009 and 2010 UNFCCC Confer- ences of the Parties meetings in Copenha- gen and Cancun, respectively, reframed the policy goal in more concrete terms: average global temperature. There was little scien- tific basis for the 2 °C figure that was adopted but it offered a simple focal point and was familiar from earlier discussions, includ- ing by the IPCC, EU and Group of 8 (G8) industrial countries 3 . At the time, the 2 °C goal sounded bold and perhaps feasible. Since then, two nasty political problems have emerged. First, the goal is effectively unachievable 4 . Owing to continued fail- ures to mitigate emissions globally, rising emissions are on track eventually to blow through this limit. To be sure, models show that it is just possible to make deep planet- wide cuts in emissions to meet the goal 5 . But those simulations make heroic assump- tions — such as almost immediate global cooperation and widespread availability Illustration by David Parkins Average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. Track a range of vital signs instead, urge David G. Victor and Charles F. Kennel.

Climate change: Embed the social sciences in climate policy

David G. Victor calls for the IPCC process to be extended to include insights into controversial social and behavioural issues.