Books on the topic 'Negotiation of flexibility'

Digital DNA identifies how the disruption of digital information and production technologies transforms how companies and national economies are innovating. Wisely guiding this transformation is an enormous challenge because innovation promotes global economic prosperity. Economic tensions and market surprises are inevitable. Part I reviews the challenges we face and argues that national and international policies require experimentation and flexibility to address them. The case studies in Part III probe issues tied to the rise of cloud computing and transborder data flows, international collaboration to reduce cybersecurity risks, and the consequences of different national standards of digital privacy protection. Significant diversity in individual national policies is inevitable, but an international baseline of policy fundamentals to facilitate “quasi-convergence” of national policies is needed. Moreover, expert multistakeholder organizations that facilitate the implementation of formal government policies hold promise but should operate across national boundaries because the implications of digital technologies are global. Parts II and IV propose a strategy for using international regulatory and trade agreements to revamp the international governance regime for digital technologies. Better measures to safeguard digital privacy and cybersecurity can improve both market access and the welfare of users. A “Digital Economy Agreement” that embraces “soft rules” requiring governments to achieve certain objectives without specifying how, can achieve sufficient quasi-convergence of national policies for innovation to flourish. The political legitimacy and flexibility of international governance regimes likely will be better if multistakeholder organizations are involved in their negotiation.

This chapter introduces a new framework for thinking about climate justice. Climate change and climate negotiations actualize equity considerations in at least three relevant dimensions: distributions of benefits and burdens across countries, within countries, and across individuals in the world. Our proposed framework enables researchers and policymakers to visualize and combine different equity considerations in these dimensions in a novel way. The simplicity of the framework can facilitate putting equity considerations back on the table in international negotiations. The flexibility of the framework enables expansions and incorporations of other equity considerations, for example intergenerational equity.

The 2°C target for global warming had been under severe scrutiny in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris in 2015 (COP21). Clearly, with a remaining carbon budget of 470–1,020 GtCO2eq from 2015 onwards for a 66% probability of stabilizing at concentration levels consistent with remaining below 2°C warming at the end of the 21st century and yearly emissions of about 40 GtCO2 per year, not much room is left for further postponing action. Many of the low stabilization pathways actually resort to the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere (known as negative emissions or Carbon Dioxide Removal [CDR]), mostly by means of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): if the biomass feedstock is produced sustainably, the emissions would be low or even carbon-neutral, as the additional planting of biomass would sequester about as much CO2 as is generated during energy generation. If additionally carbon capture and storage is applied, then the emissions balance would be negative. Large BECCS deployment thus facilitates reaching the 2°C target, also allowing for some flexibility in other sectors that are difficult to decarbonize rapidly, such as the agricultural sector. However, the large reliance on BECCS has raised uneasiness among policymakers, the public, and even scientists, with risks to sustainability being voiced as the prime concern. For example, the large-scale deployment of BECCS would require vast areas of land to be set aside for the cultivation of biomass, which is feared to conflict with conservation of ecosystem services and with ensuring food security in the face of a still growing population.While the progress that has been made in Paris leading to an agreement on stabilizing “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” was mainly motivated by the extent of the impacts, which are perceived to be unacceptably high for some regions already at lower temperature increases, it has to be taken with a grain of salt: moving to 1.5°C will further shrink the time frame to act and BECCS will play an even bigger role. In fact, aiming at 1.5°C will substantially reduce the remaining carbon budget previously indicated for reaching 2°C. Recent research on the biophysical limits to BECCS and also other negative emissions options such as Direct Air Capture indicates that they all run into their respective bottlenecks—BECCS with respect to land requirements, but on the upside producing bioenergy as a side product, while Direct Air Capture does not need much land, but is more energy-intensive. In order to provide for the negative emissions needed for achieving the 1.5°C target in a sustainable way, a portfolio of negative emissions options needs to minimize unwanted effects on non–climate policy goals.