| 英文摘要: | Net emissions transfers via international trade from developing to developed countries have increased fourfold in the past two decades—from 0.4 GtCO2 in 1990 to 1.6 GtCO2 in 20081. Consumption of goods and services in developed countries is one of the main driving forces of those emissions transfers2, 3. Therefore several proposals have been made to assign the responsibility for those emissions to the beneficiary, that is, to the consumer4, 5, 6. Although consumption-based analyses have become popular7, 8, 9, few proposals have been made for integrating emissions transfers into actual policy making. This study advances and critically evaluates three potential policy options that could be integrated in the climate-policy framework of developed countries. An energy–economic model with global coverage is used for the analysis. I find that connecting emissions transfers to international offset responsibilities is the most promising option from an environmental and economic perspective and may provide another rationale for international climate finance. The two alternative policy options of adjusting domestic emissions targets in developed countries and of implementing carbon-related tariffs and export subsidies are found to be environmentally ineffective in the latter case and economically detrimental, especially for developing countries, in both cases. Emission transfers provide a lens on the emissions responsibilities that are driven by the import and consumption demands of a country. They denote the balance of emissions embodied in trade, that is, the emissions embodied in exports minus those embodied in imports10. In the current landscape of subglobal climate policies, emissions transfers can undermine the stringency of domestic emissions-reduction targets as countries with emissions-reduction targets can import emissions-intensive products from non-regulating countries11. This so-called ‘weak carbon leakage’1, 2 leads to distributional changes in the burden sharing of emissions responsibilities as the importing country gives the appearance of being less polluting and the exporting country more polluting. In addition, it decreases the emissions coverage and the environmental effectiveness of existing climate policies. Unresolved questions persist regarding the appropriate policy response in the medium term. An ideal policy response against weak carbon leakage would be to extend the regional coverage of climate policies. Efforts within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are moving into that direction, but the implementation of a new global agreement with broad coverage may not eventuate for decades. A second-best approach for the medium term could therefore be to integrate emissions transfers into existing climate policies. Using emissions transfers as a policy lever could increase the emissions coverage of subglobal climate policies and highlight the consumption-based emissions responsibilities that are currently missed in the territorial emissions accounting system. Here I analyse three potential policy options that account for emissions transfers and incorporate consumption-based emissions responsibilities into the current climate policy framework of industrialized countries (Table 1). Those policies include adjusting domestic emissions-reduction targets for emissions transfers (DOM scenario), offsetting emissions transfers by financing emissions reductions in the emissions-exporting regions (CDF scenario), and adjusting import and export prices of goods in proportion to their carbon content, that is, extending the domestic carbon price by levying carbon tariffs on imports from non-climate regulating regions and providing export rebates for goods exported to those regions by the regulating regions (BCA scenario). Although some of those policies have been discussed before12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, here I present the first consistent analysis of the environmental and economic impacts of those policy options from the perspective of international emissions transfers.
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