The capture and permanent storage of CO₂ emissions from coal combustion is now widely viewed as imperative for stabilization of the global climate.  Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel.  This trend presents a forceful case for the development and wide dissemination of technologies that can decouple coal consumption from CO₂ emissions—the leading candidate technology to do this is carbon capture and storage (CCS). 

China simultaneously presents the most challenging and critical test for CCS deployment at scale.   While China has begun an handful of marquee CCS demonstration projects, the stark reality to be explored in this paper is that China’s incentives for keeping on the forefront of CCS technology learning do not translate into incentives to massively deploy CCS in power plant applications as CO₂ mitigation would have it.  In fact, fundamental and interrelated Chinese interests—in energy security, economic growth and development, and macroeconomic stability—directly argue against large-scale implementation of CCS in China unless such an implementation can be almost entirely supported by outside funding.  This paper considers how these core Chinese goals play out in the specific context of the country’s coal and power markets, and uses this analysis to draw conclusions about the path of CCS implementation in China’s energy sector. 

Finally, the paper argues that effective climate change policy will require both the vigorous promotion and careful calculation of CCS’s role in Chinese power generation.  As the world approaches the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 and crafts a new policy architecture for a global climate deal, international offset policy and potential US offset standards need to create methodologies that directly address CCS funding at scale.  The more closely these policies are aligned with China’s own incentives and the unique context of its coal and power markets, the better chance they have of realizing the optimal role for CCS in global climate efforts.

India has been famous for arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change. The west caused the problem and it should clean it up. That argument is increasingly untenable — both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, which is a problem that is impossible to solve without developing country participation, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. India’s own public is also demanding more.

The Indian government has outlined a broad plan for what could be done, but the plan still lacks a strategy to inform which efforts offer the most leverage on warming emissions and which are most credible because they align with India’s own interests.

This paper offers a framework for that strategy. It suggests that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India’s own self-interest, and with three case studies it suggests that leverage on emissions could amount to several hundred million tonnes of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030. (For comparison, the Kyoto Protocol has caused worldwide emission reductions of, at most, a couple hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.) We suggest in addition to identifying self-interest — which is the key concept in the burgeoning literature on “co-benefits” of climate change policy — that it is also important to examine where India and outsiders (e.g., technology providers and donors) have leverage.

One reason that strategies offered to date have remained abstract and difficult to implement is that they are not rooted in a clear understanding of where the Government of India is able to deliver on its promises (and where Indian firms have access to the needed technology and practices). Many ideas are interesting in theory but do not align with the administrative and technological capabilities of the Indian context. As the rest of the world contemplates how to engage with India on the task of controlling emissions it must craft deals that reflect India’s interests, capabilities and leverage on emissions. These deals will not be simple to craft, but there are many precedents for such arrangements in other areas of international cooperation, such as in accession agreements to the WTO.

This study investigates the skill of linear methods for downscaling provincial-scale precipitation over Indonesia from fields that describe the large-scale circulation and hydrological cycle. The study is motivated by the strong link between large-scale variations in the monsoon and the El Nino - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and regional precipitation, and the subsequent impact of regional precipitation on rice production in Indonesia. Three different downscaling methods are tested across five different combinations of large-scale predictor fields, and two different estimates of regional precipitation for Indonesia.

Downscaling techniques are most skillful over the southern islands (Java and Bali) during the monsoon onset or transition season (Sep.-Dec.). The methods are moderately skillful in the southern islands during the dry season (May-Aug.), and exhibit poor skill during the wet season (Jan.-Apr.). In northern Sumatra downscaling methods are most skillful during Jan.-Apr. with little skill at other times of the year. There is little difference between the three different linear methods used to downscale precipitation over Indonesia. Additional analysis indicates that downscaling methods that are trained on the annual cycle of precipitation produce less-biased estimates of the annual cycle of regional precipitation than raw model output, and also show some skill at reconstructing interannual variations in regional precipitation. Most of the downscaling methods' skill is attributed to year-to-year ENSO variations and to the long-term trend in precipitation and large-scale fields.

While the goal of the present study is to investigate the skill of downscaling methods specifically for Indonesia, results are expected to be more generally applicable. In particular, the downscaling models derived from observations have been effectively used to debias the annual cycle of regional precipitation from global climate models. It is expected that the methods will be generally applicable in other regions where regional precipitation is strongly affected by the large-scale circulation.

Objective. To compare safety climate between diverse U.S. hospitals and Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals, and to explore the factors influencing climate in each setting.

Data Sources. Primary data from surveys of hospital personnel; secondary data from the American Hospital Association's 2004 Annual Survey of Hospitals.

Study Design. Cross-sectional study of 69 U.S. and 30 VA hospitals.

Data Collection. For each sample, hierarchical linear models used safety-climate scores as the dependent variable and respondent and facility characteristics as independent variables. Regression-based Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition examined differences in effects of model characteristics on safety climate between the U.S. and VA samples.

Principal Findings. The range in safety climate among U.S. and VA hospitals overlapped substantially. Characteristics of individuals influenced safety climate consistently across settings. Working in southern and urban facilities corresponded with worse safety climate among VA employees and better safety climate in the U.S. sample. Decomposition results predicted 1.4 percentage points better safety climate in U.S. than in VA hospitals: −0.77 attributable to sample-characteristic differences and 2.2 due to differential effects of sample characteristics.

Conclusions. Results suggest that safety climate is linked more to efforts of individual hospitals than to participation in a nationally integrated system or measured characteristics of workers and facilities.

In June 2009, a group of experts in climate science, crop modeling, and crop development gathered at Stanford University to discuss the major needs for successful crop adaptation to climate change. To focus discussion over the three day period, the meeting centered on just three major crops – rice, wheat, and maize – given that these provide the bulk of calories to most populations. The meeting also focused on two aspects of climate– extreme high temperatures and extreme low moisture conditions (i.e. drought) – that present substantial challenges to crops in current climate and are likely to become more prevalent through time. Other aspects of climate change such as more frequent flooding or saltwater intrusion associated with rising sea levels were not addressed, although they may also be important.

The current document is split into two sections:

• a brief summary of material presented at the meeting on the current state of climate projections, crop modeling, crop genetic resources and breeding; and
  
• the collective views of participants on major needs for future research and investment, which emerged from discussions over the three day meeting.
  

The main target audiences for the document are donor institutions seeking to invest in climate adaptation, and climate and crop scientists seeking to set research agendas. We intend the term donor institutions to include private foundations, governments, and inter‐governmental organizations such as the World Bank and United Nations. An underlying assumption of the Stanford meeting was that there is a real and growing need to identify specific investment opportunities that will improve food security in the face of climate change. This is reflected, for instance, by the recent G8 announcement of a $20B investment in food security, the expectation of additional resources for adaptation from the Copenhagen Conference in 2009, and the emphasis of the Obama administration on food and climate issues.