Climate change not only corresponds to scientifically proven future implications, but also poses a politically relevant study of climate security analysis, affecting the study and practice of (international) politics in different ways. In the same vein, the EU as an international organization have been getting more involved in discussions of climate-related security risks, in which the European Commission (which represents the Union’s common interests) have been publishing a set of consecutive policy documents addressing the climate change since the early 2000’s. Accordingly, this thesis studies five big policy documents produced by the Commission addressing the climate change between 2007 and 2021 by conducting a Qualitative Content Analysis upon the discourses and conceptualizations used to inform how the issue is to be understood, while basing on the theoretical model developed by von Lucke  et al.’s (2014) that distinguishes levels of referent objects and risk-security approaches. In doing so, it finds that the Commission often draws indirect connections between the climate change and its social, political and economic implications to the EU at the territorial (and individual) level, while heavily employing risk-based approaches and promoting rather business-as-usual solutions.

Literature on climate policy of political parties’ points to an emerging congruence between populist radical right parties and scepticism toward climate change and climate policy. This thesis explores this nexus via a case study of the Sweden Democrats (SD) climate policy over a period of twelve years (2010-2022). It examines if the Sweden Democrats have expressed variations of climate scepticism and whether this has varied over time. Idea analysis and a taxonomy of three categories of climate scepticism are used for analysing official policy material of the Sweden Democrats. This thesis finds that the Sweden Democrats have outcomes on all three categories of climate scepticism: evidence (i.e., whether human caused climate change is happening), process (related to bureaucratic and scientific processes, e.g., scepticism against dominant research paradigms and bureaucratic decision making), and response scepticism (related to policy choices dealing with climate change). Over time there has been a gradual migration of scepticism from evidence and process related scepticism toward more policy-oriented forms of scepticism that concerns type of policy and attitudinal responses to climate change. Sweden Democrats climate scepticism is primarily anchored in arguments related to desired levels of national response and issues of trade/offs, with climate scepticism frequently constructed through frameworks of the potential harm that climate mitigation may do to national sovereignty, national economy, and industries. Another finding is that the Sweden Democrats overall have a lower salience and prioritization of climate issues compared to other parties represented in parliament whose climate policy they criticize, presenting their climate policy as alternative to these parties. This thesis concludes that the Sweden Democrats climate scepticism is closer to an unconvinced stance toward climate change rather than strictly denialistic, with evidentiary sceptic arguments over time becoming less frequent and decreasing in the degree of scepticism.

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This thesis focuses on the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) and draws a comparison between the introduction of the aviation industry in 2012 and the maritime industry in 2024 into the EU ETS by analyzing industry resistance as portrayed in newspaper articles. In doing so, the thesis aims to identify whether there has been a shift in organizational resistance, and if so, what the change looks like. Using content analysis, we coded a time frame of three years surrounding each introduction event respectively, processing 134 articles for the aviation industry and 132 articles for the maritime industry. Building on the coding, a quantitative analysis was employed to identify shifts in portrayed patterns. The key result from our findings shows a notable shift in the portrayal of the EU ETS from resistance to compliance. Furthermore, we can see a change in focus on more environmental highlights as well as a relocated focus from critique aimed toward the entire system to a growing focus on its practical implementation. Drawing on institutional theory, we seek to explain the shift through growing legitimacy for climate policies resulting in an increase in the cost of resistance against said systems. Our data indicates that rising resistance costs not only diminish the occurrence of resistance but also significantly boost voiced compliance. From a practical standpoint, our findings suggest the need to include industries in the practical implementation processes to ease the shift towards a sustainable economy.

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Masters in Science / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional & Community Planning / Stephanie A. Rolley / This case study considers the lessons of Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT initiative for future climate change policy and international conservation and development efforts. A comprehensive post-cancellation history of the initiative and background information regarding key domestic and international actors and institutions is presented in the Literature Review. Documents identified from LexisNexis and Google searches are analyzed to identify seven narratives of the initiative’s failure, which provide a basis for the suggestion of lessons. Questions regarding supply-side climate policy opportunities and challenges are explored. The initiative’s political mismanagement, design omissions and insufficient domestic political efforts, and a lack of contribution incentives are identified as the key causes of failure. The author concludes that the initiative’s supply-side model of shared sacrifices has the potential to align developed and developing country needs in support of greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals while addressing the difficulties posed by an emergent political economy of developing world resource extractivism in Ecuador and elsewhere. Future research regarding supply-side climate policies is suggested.

The Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (‘CDM’) allows developed countries to invest in developing country projects, to effect both greenhouse gas emission reductions and sustainable development, in exchange for carbon credits. This study considers how Brazilian CDM projects currently promote or inhibit sustainable development in Brazil. Brazil originally proposed the CDM-type framework, led the developing countries in the multilateral negotiations, and now ranks third globally for CDM project investment. The critical legal geography literature and corresponding hybrid analytical framework is applied to analyse the overlapping and multi-layered legal space of CDM projects in the context of an uneven physical and human geography. It applies legal and qualitative social research methods including textual analysis of English and Portuguese-language documents, onsite visits, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups and case studies of twelve Brazilian CDM projects of varying project types to consider: • The environmental policymaking processes underlying Brazil’s position in the international climate negotiations and how that position impacts Brazil’s assessment of proposed CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits; • The role of the Brazilian Proposal from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Brazil’s ongoing assessment of proposed CDM projects; • Brazil’s enunciated sustainable development criteria for CDM projects against the criteria actually applied; • The role of state environmental licensing authorities and nonstate actors in defining appropriate sustainable development benefits for CDM projects; and • The resulting (neo-)regulatory framework for Brazilian CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits in the context of legal pluralism. This dissertation concludes that Brazil’s CDM-specific domestic regulation is driven by the negotiating positions Brazil has taken in the international climate negotiations, most notably the 1997 Brazilian Proposal. As a result, Brazilian government-based CDM-specific regulation only considers the CDM projects’ Greenhouse Gas emission reductions benefits. Brazilian approval of domestic CDM projects also entails confirmation of administrative compliance with certain non-CDM specific regulatory frameworks, but institutional capacity issues within state and local regulatory agencies tend to undermine the effectiveness of assessing administrative compliance rather than legal and regulatory compliance. This government based regulatory framework is augmented by non-state actors, who have a neo-regulatory impact on corporate activity through demands for sustainable development benefits, giving rise to corporate sustainability programmes. There is scope for this neo-regulatory impact to extend to addressing sustainable development issues more broadly through NGO engagement with local and state environmental licensing authorities in the determination of appropriate environmental licensing conditions. In each case, the achievement of substantial sustainable development benefits is impeded by the lack of a mature multi-stakeholder dialogue involving a local government and civil society. As a result, corporate actors dominate consideration of appropriate sustainable development benefits.

This dissertation is concerned with tax rates for the use of commodities in general, and energy in particular. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are used to analyze the normative question of whether the tax rate for intermediate use by firms should be the same as the tax rate for final consumption by households. To answer this question, a distinction needs to be made between fiscal taxes for the purpose of raising revenue for the government, and Pigovian taxes for the purpose of changing behaviour. Concerning fiscal taxes, firms should not pay taxes on their use of inputs if the tax rates in final consumption are at their optimal level. If the tax rate for households is above the optimal level, intermediate use in firms should be taxed in order to increase the price of other commodities and reduce the distortion of relative prices. Essay 1 ascertains what factors determine the optimal relation between the tax rate for final consumption by households and intermediate use by firms. Essay 2 analyses Swedish energy taxes from the perspective of reducing global emission of CO2. It is found that the welfare maximizing tax rates are equal for households and firms not participating in emission trading, while firms that participate in emission trading should have a zero tax rate. Essays 3 and 4 deal with methodological issues. Essay 3 derives a new method for estimation of symmetric input-output tables from supply and use tables. This method solves the problem of negative coefficients, makes it possible to use both the industry and commodity technology assumptions simultaneously and enables the commodity technology assumption to be used even when the number of commodities is larger than the number of industries. Essay 4 describes the model used in the first two essays. The price structure developed here makes it possible to take into account price differences between different purchasers other than differences in tax rates. This essay also makes a comparison between the Swedish implementation of this model and other Swedish CGE-models used to analyse climate policy and energy taxation.

Cette thèse aborde les enjeux de l'hybridation des données pour la modélisation énergie-économie-environnement, et ses implications pour la politique climatique dans le cas de la France.Le travail met l'accent sur l'importance de construire une représentation hybride de l'économie, articulant de façon cohérente le cadre économique de la comptabilité nationale et les flux physiques, fournis par des bilans de matières (ex: bilan énergétique). Partant du principe qu’il est possible de réduire les incertitudes dans la recomposition des données grâce à des contraintes d’équilibres de flux, cette thèse met d’abord en place une méthode permettant de dépasser les problèmes de nomenclatures non cohérentes, de données disparates, ou simplement manquantes. Nous montrons que l’hybridation permet de décrire plus précisément le poids de l’énergie dans l’appareil productif français, ainsi que celui de certains secteurs de l’économie (ciment, acier).Le cadre hybride sert alors de base au modèle d’équilibre général IMACLIM. Ce modèle sert à explorer dans quelle mesure la comptabilité hybride permet de renouveler la discussion sur l’introduction d’une taxe carbone unilatérale en France.Nous mesurons d’abord l’importance de la procédure d’hybridation dans l’évaluation de l’impact macroéconomique de la politique climatique. La désagrégation sectorielle nous permet, dans un second temps, de conduire une discussion autour de paramètres centraux mais controversés de la modélisation : les élasticités-prix du commerce international, et la courbe salaire-chômage interprétée comme un indicateur du pouvoir de négociation des salaires. La thèse montre en particulier qu’il est possible, grâce au progrès sur la description sectorielle, de prendre en compte une hétérogénéité des régimes de formations salariales entre secteurs tout en les reliant à leur niveau d’exposition au commerce extérieur.Enfin, la thèse propose une méthode pour évaluer différents inventaires des émissions de CO2, tels que les émissions liées à la consommation, ou les émissions incorporées dans les importations, tout en s’appuyant sur le cadre hybride. Ainsi, nous fournissons des informations originales sur les moteurs des émissions en France qui permettront de prolonger l’analyse à d’autres mesures tels que l'ajustement d’une taxe carbone aux frontières / This thesis addresses the issue of data hybridisation for energy-economy-environment modelling and its implications for climate policy in the case of France.The work emphasises the importance of building a hybrid representation of the economy, articulating coherently the economic framework of national accounts and the physical flows, provided by sectoral database (energy balance, industrial statistics). Assuming that it is possible to reduce the uncertainties of data construction, thanks to the equilibrium constraints of flows, this thesis first introduces a method which overcomes the problems of non-coherent nomenclatures, disparate data, or simply missing ones. We show that this hybridisation procedure allows to better describe the weight of both the energy in the French productive system and key sectors of the economy (cement, steel).The hybrid framework then serves to feed the IMACLIM general equilibrium model. The model is used to explore to what extent the hybrid accounts give an opportunity to renew discussion on the introduction of a unilateral carbon tax in France.We first measure the importance of the hybridisation procedure for assessing the macroeconomic impact of climate policy.Then, the sectoral disaggregation allows us to conduct a discussion around central but controversial parameters of modelling: the international trade elasticity and the wage curve interpreted as an indicator of the wage bargaining power. The thesis shows in particular that it is possible, thanks to the progress on the sectoral description, to take into account heterogeneous representation of wage formation between sectors while linking them to their level of exposure to external trade.Finally, the thesis proposes a methodology to evaluate different emission inventories of CO2, such as "consumption-based" emissions, and emissions embodied in imports while relying on the hybrid framework. We thus provide original insights on the drivers of emissions in France which could extend the analyses to other policies such as the adjustment of a carbon tax at the borders

A simple integrated assessment framework that gives rules for the optimal carbon price, transition to the carbon-free era and stranded carbon assets is presented, which highlights the ethical, economic, geophysical and political drivers of optimal climate policy. For the ethics we discuss the role of intergenerational inequality aversion and the discount rate, where we show the importance of lower discount rates for appraisal of longer run benefit and of policy makers using lower discount rates than private agents. The economics depends on the costs and rates of technical progress in production of fossil fuel, its substitute renewable energies and sequestration. The geophysics depends on the permanent and transient components of atmospheric carbon and the relatively fast temperature response, and we allow for positive feedbacks. The politics stems from international free-rider problems in absence of a global climate deal. We show how results change if different assumptions are made about each of the drivers of climate policy. Our main objective is to offer an easy back-on-the-envelope analysis, which can be used for teaching and communication with policy makers. / Series: Ecological Economic Papers