1,721,012 research outputs found
Sweden : A Pioneer of Acidification Abatement
No full textIn Sweden, the combination of the country’s natural ecological vulnerability to acidification and its geographical location has been domestic focal points for the treatment of the ‘acid rain’ issue. Political interest in the acidification issue in Sweden emerged in the late 1960s, when the problems of long-range transport of sulphuric compounds and their harmful environmental effects were first highlighted by scientists. In 1967, the newly established Swedish Environmental Protection Agency submitted a plan to the Social Democratic government for lowering the sulphur content in fuel oil to 2.5 per cent weight. Based on the requirements stipulated in the First and Second Sulphur Protocol, and the Nitrogen Protocol, Sweden’s implementation and compliance records have been successful. Sweden has fulfilled the binding obligations enshrined in all these three protocols. Abatement costs in the 1980s benefited from the major investments in energy saving technology in the industry sector that took place in the economically expansive period before the oil crisis in the 1970s
Science, Technology and International Collaboration, 1999
No full textThis survey was set up and completed as a collaboration project between scientists at The School of Marine Affairs, The University of Washington, Fridtjof Nansen Institute and the University of Oslo, Department of Political Science. The project arouse from a common interest in more precise knowledge about why some international regimes “succeed” while others “fail”. The study was based on two explanations. One of them seeks the answer in characteristics of the problem the regimes are going to solve. The other seeks the answer in characteristics of the institutions and systems that deals with the problem. The assumption here is that some institutions and systems have a greater capacity than others to solve particular types of problems. The study then attempted to specify each of these theses in a set of more precise hypotheses, and tested this against the empirical material. The database provides information about fourteen international regimes and variance in regime effectiveness. The regimes included dealt with the following list of issue-areas: Satellite telecommunication, nuclear non-proliferation, dumping of low-level radioactive waste at sea, ship-generated oil pollution, marine pollution in the Northeast Atlantic: Oslo Dumping Convention, Marine Pollution in the Northeast Atlantic: The Paris Convention, Marine Pollution in the Mediterranean: The Barcelona Convention, Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), Stratospheric ozone depletion, international trade in endangered species (CITES), International Whaling (IWC), high seas salmon fisheries in the North Pacific (INPFC), Antarctic resources (CCAMLR) and South Pacific tuna fisheries (FFA)
Modelling the international climate change negotiations: A non-technical outline of model architecture
Get PDFOne of CICERO’s current projects – undertaken in collaboration with the Fridtjof Nansen Institute – aims at developing a model enabling us (1) to explore systematically the political feasibility of alternative policy options, and (2) to determine the settlement range – i.e. the set of politically feasible solutions – in the global climate change negotiations. This paper provides a non-technical outline of the overall architecture of the model, and describes briefly its main components or modules. More specifically, it addresses three main questions: (1) In what terms should we characterise policy options? (2) How can we best describe the negotiation system, including the institutional setting, the configuration of actor preferences, and the distribution of relevant political resources ("power")? (3) How can political feasibility be determined on the basis of data about policy options and the negotiation system
Climate Change and International Relations (After Kyoto)
No full textThis review “diagnoses” climate change as an international governance challenge and explores the political feasibility of alternative “cures.” Human activities’ growing effect on Earth's climate system is extremely challenging, characterized by, inter alia, very long time lags between mitigation measures (∼costs) and environmental effects (∼benefits) and by stark asymmetries between “guilt” in causing the problem and vulnerability to climate change. Two main cures have been suggested. Some analysts argue that because climate change is a global process, adequate solutions must likewise be global. Others shift attention from the challenge's format to the sources of human motivation, arguing that a decentralized (bottom-up) approach will more directly engage a wider spectrum of motivations and actors. These cures are neither mutually exclusive nor easily combined. IR research contributes more to the former cure than to the latter but can play a constructive role in linking them
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