As we are approaching the COP26 meeting to be held in Glasgow later this year, a highly anticipated milestone that is to be expected is the finalization of the rulebook for Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Article 6 calls for ‘voluntary cooperation’ between public and private actors in carbon markets and other forms of international cooperation to meet the climate goals.
Ex-ante policy modelling assessments have shown that international cooperation on carbon pricing can result in economic and environmental gains that potentially could be used to boost the ambition of the climate targets. In our OECD working paper (jointly with Sonja Peterson, Daniel Nachtigall and Jane Ellis) we present a review of the literature on ex-ante policy modelling studies that examine the economic and environmental gains that could be realised if nations cooperate on climate action. Ex-ante modelling studies usually use Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models or Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) to understand the socio-economic and environmental impacts of climate policies. We group the research articles into the following five types of cooperative actions that could be realised between countries – carbon price harmonization, extending the coverage of carbon pricing systems, implementing a multilateral fossil fuel subsidy reform, establishing international sectoral agreements and, mitigating carbon-leakage through strategic climate coalitions and border carbon adjustment.
The literature shows that all forms of international cooperation could potentially deliver economic and environmental benefits. Extending carbon markets to include new regions would reduce the aggregate mitigation costs but would not lead to unanimous gains for each of the participating countries and thus compensation mechanisms would be needed to incentivize participation from countries that would face costs. Sectoral agreements have a limited impact but could help in the reduction of GHG emissions though not cost-effectively. All of the studies unambiguously show that removal of fossil fuel subsidies would lead to an improvement in aggregate global welfare.
Further details about the results and individual papers can be found here:
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Sneha Thube ’16 is a researcher at the Kiel Institute for World Economy. She is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics.