Uncertainties of the costs of the Kyoto Protocol - A meta-analysis

Policy decisions to ratify recent climate policy agreements, as the Kyoto Protocol, rely on quantitative impact assessments, which are primarily based on applied economic modelling concepts. A crucial decision factor for politicians are the economic compliance costs of implementing binding emissions reduction targets. The Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) compared different international studies in order to assess regional compliance costs. In this paper, we investigate the uncertainties surrounding these cost assessments of adopting the Kyoto Protocol for the main climate policy negotiating countries: USA, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and Russia. It turns out that the uncertainties of cost estimates are much lower for the USA than for Japan and Western Europe. Furthermore we analyze the dependency of model outcomes on model characteristics. We find, that the energy sector representation crucially determines the compliance cost assessment.

Hawellek, Julia, Claudia Kemfert and Johannes Kremers (2003), Uncertainties of the costs of the Kyoto Protocol - A meta-analysis, Oldenburg