Introduction

Both developing and developed countries hold a central view in common in international climate negotiations: each thinks the other should be doing more to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To date, international negotiations and agreements on climate change have not been particularly successful in creating significant changes in either the commitments or actions being adopted by developing countries with respect to GHG mitigation. Our proposal in this chapter is to build on existing offset policies to enhance efforts by developing countries to combat climate change.

For a variety of environmental and political reasons, focusing on developing countries is crucial at this stage in the climate regime's evolution (Frankel 2007). Most obviously, large developing countries —especially India and China—account for an increasingly important share of global emissions as a result of rapid population and GDP growth (Stern 2007: 169). The International Energy Agency forecasts that three-quarters of the increase in global energy use over the next two decades will come from developing countries (IEA 2007). A successful climate architecture will have to include mitigation in these parts of the world. At the same time, the world's largest emitter, the United States, has made participation in binding emissions reduction contingent on actions by large emitters in the South. Thus developing country participation has emerged as the lynchpin of progress in global climate negotiations.

One possibility is to encourage developing countries to participate by assuming mitigation commitments, just as their richer counterparts do. While this is a potentially viable strategy in the long run, it is unrealistic and not essential in the short term.