What are the possible policies for meeting the problems of climate change, overfishing, and depletion of mineral resources? What is the effectiveness of tradeable permits and taxes, how can they deal with tradeoffs over time, and especially how are they compatible with the need for economic growth among the poorer nations who are, at the same time, contributing to the problems? What is the scope for directed technological change?

Recognizing the importance of challenges to the Earth system is only the beginning. We must ask how to meet them. This requires a great deepening of our knowledge of economic and social systems and of changes in values to accompany the changes in needs.

Is a direct carbon tax the best way of reducing the carbon footprints of individuals, compared with more indirect taxes?

Direct taxation of the critical issue. Do we give subsidies (see UN-EP on feedback on subsidies) to essential transport activities. Such a tax could be used to subsidise other ecological activities.

Pr Michael Spedding,
Deputy Director Research,
Chairman NC-IUPHAR,
Experimental Sciences
Institute of Research Servier
11 Rue des Moulineaux
92150 Suresnes
France; michael.spedding@fr.netgrs.com

What are the institutional, technological, and analytical requirements for monitoring biocarbon stocks and for distinguishing between changes in the stocks from “natural” drivers, general global socio-economic drivers, specific economic decision drivers (i.e. indirect land use change), and ecosystem specific management efforts to sequester biocarbon?

Biocarbon stocks are critical to the carbon cycle and climate change. Biocarbon stocks change in different places due to different combinations of drivers: social and natural, current and historic, direct and indirect. Determining whether we are making any headway in maintaining and enhancing biocarbon stocks will require considerable monitoring of the stocks, monitoring and analysis of the drivers, and credible models of how the drivers interact to affect biocarbon stocks.

Hopes for providing economic incentives for enhancing biocarbon stocks, especially if done through private markets as offsets in a cap and trade system, will require scientifically-informed public oversight to avoid creating fictitious assets that do nothing to mitigate climate change while having the potential to destabilize the economy with the acknowledgment of their fictitious nature. Non-market international agreements to manage biocarbon will also require scientifically-informed public oversight to assure national efforts are effective and agreements have meaning. If the institutional and technological requirements of managing biocarbon and determining the drivers of change are prohibitive, then there is a stronger reason to reduce fossil hydrocarbon combustion more quickly and directly reduce other socio-economic drivers of biocarbon stock change.