No major news out of Poznan yet, but there’s been no shortage of analysts and experts and panels addressing the topic here in Washington. The primary message is one of managing expectations, for both Poznan and next year in Copenhagen, such that “failure” doesn’t become the primary message if, as most expect, the talks stretch into 2010 and beyond.

In the meantime, I figured I would post a few links to some key documents, studies and analyses that might prove useful for those of you trying to figure out just what all of this means.

First, the current talks evolved out of the Bali Action Plan, which came out of last year’s meeting in Indonesia. The UN climate folks also have produced a nice summary of international proposals that are currently on the table. Given that there isn’t much else to go on at present, this document is likely to be key in Poznan.

Perhaps poking fun at hard-line skeptics who claim climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy, the Global Canopy Programme has released The Little REDD Book as a guide to negotiations over deforestation, which accounts for some 20 percent of global emissions. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degredation. Its inclusion in the talks was a major breakthrough in Bali, led by many tropical countries who see an opportunity to cash in on conservation.

More broadly, the discussions to date are largely framed around how to create a single global cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, like the European system established under Kyoto Protocol. The problem is that developing nations – the largest source of new emissions going forward – are legitimately worried that emissions caps would curb their efforts to escape poverty. Rich countries are willing to let that commitment slide in the early years and put money (amount to be decided…) on the table to coax them into the system.

But that begs the question: What can be expected of developing nations today? Countries like China, India and Brazil might be willing to adopt a suite of carbon policies that, say, promote clean energy. Or perhaps they would be willing to set require stricter environmental standards for various heavy industries. Both ideas are hot right now, although the United States and others are looking for ways to ensure that the resulting emissions reductions are, to use the UN lingo, “measurable, reportable and verifiable.” The Pew Center on Global Climate Change reviews these and other issues on its website.

And I’ll finish with a study posted last week by the Harvard Project on International Agreements. This document looks at four different architectures – only one of which is a global cap-and-trade system. Two other options include carbon taxes, widely applied at the national level, and a portfolio of treaties that tackle various problems one at a time. The fourth is based on linkages among separate cap-and-trade systems that are gradually popping up around the globe, a ground-up process that the Harvard folks believe is already under way.

The latter two scenarios might well serve as an optimistic assessment of what might happen if the pessimists – who believe that global warming is too big, too difficult and too complex to address in a single treaty – are right.

No major news out of Poznan yet, but there’s been no shortage of analysts and experts and panels addressing the topic here in Washington. The primary message is one of managing expectations, for both Poznan and next year in Copenhagen, such that “failure” doesn’t become the primary message if, as most expect, the talks stretch into 2010 and beyond.

In the meantime, I figured I would post a few links to some key documents, studies and analyses that might prove useful for those of you trying to figure out just what all of this means.

First, the current talks evolved out of the Bali Action Plan, which came out of last year’s meeting in Indonesia. The UN climate folks also have produced a nice summary of international proposals that are currently on the table. Given that there isn’t much else to go on at present, this document is likely to be key in Poznan.

Perhaps poking fun at hard-line skeptics who claim climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy, the Global Canopy Programme has released The Little REDD Book as a guide to negotiations over deforestation, which accounts for some 20 percent of global emissions. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degredation. Its inclusion in the talks was a major breakthrough in Bali, led by many tropical countries who see an opportunity to cash in on conservation.

More broadly, the discussions to date are largely framed around how to create a single global cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, like the European system established under Kyoto Protocol. The problem is that developing nations – the largest source of new emissions going forward – are legitimately worried that emissions caps would curb their efforts to escape poverty. Rich countries are willing to let that commitment slide in the early years and put money (amount to be decided…) on the table to coax them into the system.

But that begs the question: What can be expected of developing nations today? Countries like China, India and Brazil might be willing to adopt a suite of carbon policies that, say, promote clean energy. Or perhaps they would be willing to set require stricter environmental standards for various heavy industries. Both ideas are hot right now, although the United States and others are looking for ways to ensure that the resulting emissions reductions are, to use the UN lingo, “measurable, reportable and verifiable.” The Pew Center on Global Climate Change reviews these and other issues on its website.

And I’ll finish with a study posted last week by the Harvard Project on International Agreements. This document looks at four different architectures – only one of which is a global cap-and-trade system. Two other options include carbon taxes, widely applied at the national level, and a portfolio of treaties that tackle various problems one at a time. The fourth is based on linkages among separate cap-and-trade systems that are gradually popping up around the globe, a ground-up process that the Harvard folks believe is already under way.

The latter two scenarios might well serve as an optimistic assessment of what might happen if the pessimists – who believe that global warming is too big, too difficult and too complex to address in a single treaty – are right.