Avoided deforestation can be characterized as the use of financial incentives to reduce rates of deforestation and forest degradation, with much of the focus on forests in tropical countries. While avoided deforestation, as a policy issue, is not new, the current debate in academic and policy circles on including it in future climate change mitigation strategies such as the Clean Development Mechanism is gathering pace – and this debate is only likely to intensify as negotiations continue over what should be included in the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. Up until now, however, the debate in terms of the scientific and economic implications of avoided deforestation has not been brought together. This book aims to bring together important research findings in the area along with their policy implications, whilst linking avoided deforestation to political economy as well as to the latest developments in environmental and natural resource economics.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

Governments and civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean should be well informed about the potential costs and benefits of combating climate change, their policy options over the next decades, and the global context for these policy decisions. At the same time, the global community needs to be better informed about the unique perspective of the Latin American and Caribbean region: problems the region will face, its potential contributions toward combating global warming, and how to maximize this potential while continuing to maintain growth and reduce poverty. This book, a companion volume to Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change, seeks to help fill both these needs.

This year's Human Development Report explains why we have less than a decade to change course and start living within our global carbon budget, and how climate change will create long-run low human development traps, pushing vulnerable people into a downward spiral of deprivation.

Land has long been overlooked in economics. That is now changing. A substantial part of the solution to the climate crisis may lie in growing crops for fuel and using trees for storing carbon. This book investigates the potential of these options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, estimates the costs to the economy, and analyses the trade-offs with growing food. The first part presents new databases that are necessary to underpin policy-relevant research in the field of climate change while describing and critically assessing the underlying data, the methodologies used, and the first applications. Together, the new data and the extended models allow for a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a land use and climate policy. This book outlines key empirical and analytical issues associated with modelling land use and land use change in the context of global climate change policy. It places special emphasis on the economy-wide competition for land and other resources, especially; The implications of changes in land use for the cost of climate change mitigation, Land use change as a result of mitigation, and Feedback from changes in the global climate to land use. By offering synthesis and evaluation of a variety of different approaches to this challenging field of research, this book will serve as a key reference for future work in the economic analysis of land use and climate change policy.

Global climate change is perceived to be one of the biggest challenges for international politics in the 21st century. This work seeks to fuse a global governance perspective together with different interpretive approaches, offering a novel way of looking at international climate politics. Equipped with a common interpretive tool-kit, the authors examine different issue-areas and excavate the contours of an overall pattern – the depoliticisation of climate governance. It is this concept which represents the overarching theme connecting the different contributions, addressing issues such as how the securitization of climate change conceals its socio-economic roots; how highly political decisions and value-judgements are couched in the terms of science; how the reframing of climate change as a matter of economic calculation and investment narrows the scope of political action; and how the prevailing concentration on technological solutions to climate change turns it into a mere administrative issue to be tackled by experts. Highlighting the depoliticisation of highly political issues provides a means to bring the political back into one of the most important issue areas of 21st century world politics. The editors have assembled a series of 14 interpretive inquiries into discourses of global climate governance which aim to flesh out an interpretive methodology, demonstrating the value it offers to those seeking to achieve a better understanding of global climate governance. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, political theory and climate change.