Overline: Tuesday Talk

Headline: The spectre of carbon leakage

Tuesday Talk by Nino Jordan, appointed Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow

This is an online event with zoom. You will receive the link to join the event with the confirmation e-mail after your  registration.

Abstract: The spectre of carbon leakage - the relocation of emissions-intensive operations to escape regulation, displacing rather than reducing emissions - is a key barrier to high climate policy ambition levels. Carbon clubs and border carbon adjustments are the main instruments proposed to counter carbon leakage but they can only be implemented at a high level, there is high uncertainty about their prospects and they may lack in ambition. Maximum intensity standards for the carbon embodied in products can be a meaningful alternative or complement to carbon pricing, with the advantage that they can be adopted in targeted and flexible ways at different levels of government. They could be unilaterally adopted or as part of clubs. In particular climate action leaders such as California, Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have started to introduce such standards. Maximum product carbon standards for embodied emissions and whole-life cycle carbon standards provide an opportunity to exploit the potential of polycentric multi-level governance to rapidly accelerate the decarbonisation of industry and the built environment, allowing climate leaders to individually push ahead while contributing to the climate governance infrastructure commons.

Bio: Dr Nino Jordan leads the MSc Sustainable Resources: Economics, Policy and Transitions at the University College London Institute for Sustainable Resources. He has taught Policies for Sustainable Resources and Environmental Lifecycle Governance at UCL and Climate Policies in Comparative Perspective at the Bremen University of Applied Science. Starting in 2010 Nino has been a researcher with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, and the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, working on projects for German ministries and European Institutions, mostly on eco-innovation. Nino did his PhD at UCL and studied at the University of Bremen and Jacobs University Bremen. He was an exchange student with the Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, and Yale University, New Haven. His most recent publication is Grubb, Jordan, Hertwich et al (2022) Carbon Leakage, Consumption, and Trade, in Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 47:753–95

Nino Jordan is appointed as Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow 2023. During his Fellowship he will conduct research about “International Policy learning for Rapid Evaluation, Adaptation and Diffusion of Embodied Emission Standards”. Industrial sectors do not get sufficient price incentives for a rapid decarbonization. Even the successful implementation of border carbon adjustments as a measure against carbon leakage could still result in a price too low for triggering the radical innovation needed. Maximum intensity standards for the carbon embodied in products can be a meaningful alternative or complement to carbon pricing, with the advantage that they can be adopted in targeted and flexible ways at different levels of government. In particular climate action leaders such as California, Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have started to introduce such standards. For the Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellowship, Nino Jordan proposes a project for accelerated mutual policy learning on embodied emission standards between stakeholders in Germany, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, EU, California and the US Federal Government. The project aims to accelerate the evaluation, adaptation and diffusion of effective approaches.