Issue No.13

Contents:

1. NEWS
A. COP 5 CLOSES WITH PROGRESS ON SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES
B. MAJOR CLIMATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES IN GERMAN-LANGUAGE COUNTRIES, PART II
2. THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE TO INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ICT
3. EDITORIAL OFFICE AND SUBSCRIPTION INFO.
4. CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Quote of the week: "Much is known, but there is even more ignorance", referring to ongoing need for more research evident in the 1995 IPCC assessment report, as commented in the introduction to the Climatic Change paper cited below

1. NEWS
A. COP 5 CLOSES WITH PROGRESS ON SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES
Emissions monitoring from both industrialized and developing countries should be improving according to the UNFCCC's Closing Press Release from COP5. "A number of decisions coming out of Bonn settled important substantive issues. Agreement was reached on how to improve the rigor of national reports from industrialized countries ... and ..action was also taken to address bottlenecks in the delivery and consideration of national communications by developing countries."
Within both industrialized and developing countries there are "entities", i.e. companies, that report to the national level. Two side events unluckily scheduled on the same evening at COP 5 dealt with entity-level reporting. One of these initiatives, covered in Computers and Climate No. 4, concentrates on company systems, http://www.ghgprotocol.org.  During its side event, Jan Corfee-Morlot from the OECD suggested coordinating company emissions monitoring systems better with national inventories. The OECD has papers on this issue available at http://www.oecd.org/env/cc/monitoring.htm

In one of these papers, Stephane Willems concludes that "information technology may be the only way to allow many entities to participate in entity level emissions monitoring and assigned amount tracking systems," Key features of domestic monitoring systems under the Kyoto Protocol (October 21, 1999), p.23, http://www.oecd.org/env/docs/cc/domsyst20.pdf

The other related side event was held by the International Energy Agency IEA, Paris, where Lee Schipper has papers delving more deeply into other types of indicators besides GHG emissions that reveal efficiency potentials in energy conversion from the IEA Energy Indicators Effort, http://www.iea.org/pubs/free/articles/schipper/oneman.htm, mailto: ljschipper@lbl.gov

B. MAJOR CLIMATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES IN GERMAN-LANGUAGE COUNTRIES, PART II

Potsdam Climate Research in the East
Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research initiated the ICLIPS Project (Integrated Assessment of Climate Protection Strategies) under federal German funding, in which the research institute in Kassel (see previous issue) cooperates as one of the partners, http://www.pik-potsdam.de. Other ICLIPS partners include the Battelle Institute, Washington DC, USA, the Kiel Institute of World Economics, the German Economic Institute in Berlin (associated partner), IIASA in Laxenburg (see previous issue), the Jackson Environment Institute of the University of London and Max Planck Institute MPI for Meteorology, Hamburg (see Computers and Climate 11). The first part of the ICLIPS project will be completed at the end of this year.

Integrated Assessment at Potsdam is based on the Tolerable Windows Approach (TWA). TWA has been under development since 1995, when the German Advisory Council on Global Change WBGU was preparing a recommendation for COP 1 in Berlin. Later in 1997 for Kyoto, it sought to observe "minimum requirements for equity", and to present corresponding strategies for action, http://awi-bremerhaven.de/WBGU/wbgu_sn1997.html

The main objective of TWA is to support climate change decision-making by clearly separating value judgements from scientific analysis. In order to achieve that goal, TWA starts with an explicit normative definition of constraints ("guard-rails") that exclude those climate impacts and socio-economic consequences of mitigation measures that are perceived to be intolerable by social actors or their designated representatives, the policymakers. In a subsequent step, a scientific analysis along the "causality chain" is carried out in order to derive the set of all admissible climate protection strategies, i.e. the set of all policy paths that are compatible
with the pre-defined constraints.

From among the set of admissible policy paths determined in this way, a single climate protection strategy may be selected by taking into account additional criteria. This can be achieved, for instance, by applying quantitative policy optimization methods (such as cost-effectiveness models), by referring to soft criteria and qualitative arguments (such as an intuitive interpretation of the precautionary principle) or by seeking a compromise in a negotiation process.

The admissible scope for action is delineated by "emission corridors" to which politicians can refer in negotiations without having to commission new assessments of the alternative proposals on the table, as long as their normative judgements are not influenced. Thus TWA can facilitate climate change negotiations by enhancing the ability to judge immediately whether different emission path proposals are acceptable or not.

TWA is intermediate between two earlier approaches, one of which aimed at policy optimization and the other at policy evaluation, especially at a high geographical resolution.

The most current description of TWA is a paper co-authored by four Potsdam scientists, Gerhard Petschel-Held, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, Ferenc Toth and Thomas Bruckner (who contributed the above description of TWA, bruckner@pik-potsdam.de), along with Klaus Hasselmann, MPI for Meteorology, Hamburg, the latter, one of the recipients of the German 1998 Environment Prize from the German Federal Environment Foundation DBU; the other two recipients being his colleagues at MPI Lennart Bengtsson and Hartmut Grassl (see last issue). The paper has been published in Climatic Change 41: 303-331, 1999. Further details of the TWA are discussed in a paper forthcoming in the journal Environmental Modeling and Assessment. PiK, Toth and Hasselmann are members of the new European Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment EFIEA, http://ohrid.cca.vu.nl/english/o_o/instituten/IVM/research/efiea/scimem.htm

Besides ICLIPS and TWA, which is applicable to critical thresholds for the North Atlantic Deep Water formation, a lot of work in Potsdam is being devoted to the thermohaline circulation as well as to various aspects of regional climate impact research.

In Potsdam there is also the Geoforschungszentrum, http://www.gfz-potsdam.de. There the team around Dr. Ludger Timmen has developed a new airborne device which incorporates a multi-technique approach to map land and sea surface heights, which holds many advantages over satellite systems.

Preview
The next issue of Computers and Climate will continue our coverage of earth observation systems (as above) and energy scenarios (as below). The latter will also involve a book from our friends at the Centre for European Economic Research ZEW Mannheim, the Wuppertal Institute and the European Business Council for a Sustainable Energy Future, E5.

2. THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE TO INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ICT

World Energy Council WEC Building Database of Greenhouse Gas GHG Reduction Projects Worldwide
The first of the WEC's seven objectives was "to find out how much is ongoing and planned world-wide, primarily within the energy sector, to curb and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including initiatives in developing and transitional economies, which will result in emissions being lower than they would otherwise have been,"
http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/global/open.plx?file=lists/GHGtaskforce.htm

The preferred source of data was the Carbon Dioxide Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA, http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/

A preliminary Microsoft Access database has been created in co-operation with CPM, a Life Cycle Assessment competence centre at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is accessible from the Internet and contains data on GHG emission-reduction projects.A sample can be viewed at http://deville.tep.chalmers.se/wec_gwp_red/

WEC has redesigned the Pilot Programme on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions, and still has doubts about issues such as costs, giving the programme only preliminary status. WEC's Task Force will report to the Programme Committee at the latter's May 2000 meeting, and again in New Delhi in November 2000, as is ascertainable on its Website after registering.

WEC has cosponsored the ambitious, peer-reviewed World Energy Assessment, and presented it for further review at COP5 in Bonn along with its fellow cosponsors UNDP and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, http://www.undp.org/seed/eap/activities

U.S. Business Likes ICT, but not Necessarily the Kyoto Protocol
Companies and their representatives covered in this column in earlier issues, Steve Harper of Intel and Judith Bayer of United Technologies, spoke at a COP 5 side event organized by the International Climate Change Partnership ICCP, http://www.iccp.net

ICCP is now coming out in favor of Early Action, despite its continuing opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, reason enough to provoke criticism from Friends of the Earth FOE,
http://www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/briefings/html/19971215150450.html

Thus ICCP's position is similar to that taken by the Business Roundtable BRT, http://www.brtable.org

Judith Bayer of UT and ICCP Director Kevin Fay were speakers recently at the Pew Center conference, http://www.pewclimate.org/projects/conf_091399_agenda.html