Heep Papers: 2013

Enel Foundation offers additional support to the Enel Endowment for Environmental Economics to the Harvard Environmental Economics Program (HEEP). HEEP develops innovative answers to today’s complex environmental issues, by providing a venue to bring together faculty and graduate students from across Harvard University engaged in research, teaching, and outreach in environmental and natural resource economics and related public policy.

The program sponsors research projects, convenes workshops, and supports graduate education to further understanding of critical issues in environmental, natural resource, and energy economics and policy around the world. In the context of this relations, since 2012, Enel Foundation has promoted the development of discussion papers adressign important topics in international climate policy, especially those pertaining to market- based approaches to climate change. The papers are discussed during side events that take place in the framework of the Conference Of the Parties.

Linkage of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Systems: Learning from experience

The last ten years have seen the growth of linkages between many of the world's cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gases (GHGs), both directly between systems, and indirectly via connections to credit systems such as the Clean Development Mechanism. If nations have tried to act in their own self-interest, this proliferation of linkages implies that for many nations, the expected benefits of linkage outweighed expected costs. In this paper, authors draw on the past decade of experience with carbon markets to test a series of hypotheses about why systems have demonstrated this revealed preference for linking.