Section: New Results

Benchmarking tools for the climate negotiation of GHG emission reduction trajectories

Climate negotiations related to global warming are another important issue of sustainable development. In this framework that is place at international scale we propose a benchmarking tool that is designed to avoid the main limitations of actual negotiation schemes. Our approach is based on the original Soft Landing proposition, made by Criqui and Kouvaritakis in the early 2000. We develop an up to date solution which improves the original idea mainly by introducing common but differentiated emission reduction profiles and by developing a dedicated algorithm for that purpose (called REDEM). To be compatible with global objectives, it is commonly accepted that for most developing regions, the national emission curves should admit a maximum and then should progressively decline. Similarly, we emphasize the fact that, in order to achieve the global objectives, all states will have to entail mitigation efforts, the intensity which may be measured by the rate of variation of the national emissions. At one point, the effort will reach a maximum, when the rate of variation in absolute value is at its maximum, and then decrease. In other words, there will also be a peak in the effort. Then we propose to base the benchmark on this peak of effort. This work has been done in collaboration with EDDEN Laboratory, in particular Patrick Criqui and Constantin Ilasca.