WORKING PARTY ON GLOBAL AND STRUCTURAL POLICIES OECD Workshop on the Benefits of Climate Policy: Improving Information for Policy Makers

Project is to outline a conceptual framework to estimate the benefits of climate change policies, and to help organise information on this topic for policy makers. The Workshop covered both adaptation and mitigation policies, and related to different spatial and temporal scales for decision-making. However, particular emphasis was placed on understanding global benefits at different levels of mitigation-in other words, on the incremental benefit of going from one level of climate change to another. Participants were also asked to identify gaps in existing information and to recommend areas for improvement, including topics requiring further policy-related research and testing. The Workshop brought representatives from governments together with researchers from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Further background on the workshop, its agenda and participants, can be found on the internet at: The overall Project is overseen by the OECD Working Party on Global and Structural Policy (Environment Policy Committee). The Secretariat would like to thank the governments of Canada, Germany and the United States for providing extra-budgetary financial support for the work. This paper is issued as an authored " working paper "-one of a series emerging from the Project. The ideas expressed in the paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD or its Member Countries. As a working paper, this document has received only limited peer review. Some authors will be further refining their papers, either to eventually appear in the peer-reviewed academic literature, or to become part of a forthcoming OECD publication on this Project. The objective of placing these papers on the internet at this stage is to widely disseminate the ideas contained in them, with a view toward facilitating the review process. Future emissions under the SRES scenarios are described as examples of no-climate-policy scenarios. The production of policy scenarios is guided by Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which requires stabilization of greenhouse-gas concentrations. It is suggested that the choice of stabilization targets should be governed by the need to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, while the choice of the pathway towards a given target should be determined by some form of cost-benefit analysis. The WRE concentration profiles are given as examples of stabilization pathways, and an alternative 'overshoot' pathway is introduced. Probabilistic projections (as probability density functions – pdfs) for global-mean temperature under the SRES scenarios are …