جستجو در بازار جهانی کربن : تجزیه و تحلیل زنجیره ارزش CDM و مدل های کسب و کار رایج

From a slow start, the clean development mechanism (CDM) market has recently experienced enormous growth. However, the CDM market has been increasingly criticised, resulting in a lively debate about how to reform, complement, or replace it. In order to increase transparency and assist policy-makers in better understanding the current market, we depart from the traditional project-level perspective on CDM and analyse commercial activities by utilising data from UNEP Risoe's CDM Bazaar. To this end, we first establish a seven-step value chain by conducting a factor analysis on the commercial activities indicated in the Bazaar and, second, identify nine prevalent business models with a cluster analysis of all 495 participating organisations. Based on these analyses, we discuss potential impacts on the value chain of different policy scenarios that rely on carbon credits as incentive. We find that the importance of specific regulatory CDM know-how and general business activities such as finance varies strongly with the different policy scenarios. Our analysis serves to sensitise policy-makers and business about implications of different regulatory designs.

While industrialised countries are responsible for the bulk of historic and current GHG emissions, developing countries are greatly increasing their emissions, thus turning climate change mitigation into a global problem (IPCC, 2007). The clean development mechanism (CDM) is currently the only market mechanism aimed at triggering changes in the pattern of emission-intensive activities in emerging economies. It has delivered recognisable achievements. The CDM market is growing at double-digit rates and represented a market volume of €5.4 billion in 2007, which is assumed to have leveraged another €24 billion in additional investment for clean energy projects (Capoor and Ambrosi, 2008). In addition to transferring financial resources, the CDM also contributes to the transfer of cleaner technologies to developing countries (Schneider et al., 2008b). At the same time, however, the CDM has come under much scrutiny and is frequently criticised. The criticisms have centred around the CDM's high transaction costs (Michaelowa and Jotzo, 2005), the inherent difficulty of testing for additionality and achieving sustainable development (Holm Olsen, 2007; Schneider, 2007), and the lack of incentives for developing countries to take on binding emission reduction targets (Wara and Victor, 2008). Furthermore, even apart from these criticisms, the above-mentioned CDM market volume still only raises a tenth of the investment flows needed for developing countries (UNFCCC, 2007a). As a result, policy-makers the world over are debating options to reform, complement or replace the CDM in the context of a post-Kyoto climate regime. In any case, such a mechanism must “focus on the role of private-sector investments as they constitute the largest share of investment and financial flows” (UNFCCC, 2007a, p. 5). In order for policy-makers to enhance or redirect the emerging private-sector dynamics created by the CDM, it is crucial for them to have a solid understanding of the current market structure and how different regulatory designs might impact the market dynamics in the future. However, most analyses of the CDM to date have focused either on project-level analyses or on the technological and geographical distribution of the entire market. Only very few studies focus on the firm perspective (Lütken and Michaelowa, 2008; Schneider et al., 2008a) and strategic behaviour by market actors thus still remains rather opaque. Although there is a lot of publicly accessible information on regulatory decisions, project documentation, and even CER prices,1 this data does not allow to easily assess the market structure including market activities other than those listed in the PDDs. While such analyses are mostly offered as proprietary services by specialized firms, there are few analyses available in the public domain.2 Therefore, our aim is to increase the market's transparency by analysing two research questions that correspond to two important dimensions of the market. First, we investigate which activities constitute a holistic value chain of the CDM market, i.e., we also include activities that go beyond the requirements of the regulatory process. Second, we examine which types of actors cover which value chain steps in order to shed light on prevalent business models. These analyses form the basis for sensitising both policy-makers and the private sector to possible effects of different post-Kyoto scenarios on the dynamics of the private sector's engagement in mitigation efforts in developing countries. The paper begins with a short review of the CDM and related corporate activities (Section 2), and a presentation of our data and methodology (Section 3). Next, 4 and 5 present results on the value chain and prevalent business models. Finally, Section 6 discusses the possible impacts of different post-Kyoto regimes on the value chain and resulting market dynamics.

While the above-described market structure and the resulting dynamics have contributed to a strong CDM market development, the market's size is still not adequate to sufficiently address the challenge of carbon mitigation in developing countries. Therefore, there is an urgent need to scale up these efforts by reforming, complementing, or replacing the CDM. As a result, recent international climate negotiations have identified the need to explore “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” taken by developing countries and “cooperative sectoral approaches and sector-specific actions” (UNFCCC, 2007b). In the following, we present a preliminary assessment of how different policy scenarios could affect the value chain and the carbon market, and, consequently, the speed and direction of GHG mitigation in developing countries. In the past, carbon services have been central to the market due to its regulatory complexity as can be observed from the large number of firms offering these services and the fact that some are even publicly listed and of considerable size. However, it is less clear which value chain steps will become more or less important in the future. The aim of this, arguably subjective, analysis is to provide the means for a structured discussion and sensitisation of policy-makers about possible effects of regulatory designs that are currently being debated. We chose three policy scenarios which together broadly cover the range of debated proposals that rely on carbon markets to incentivise developing country action: tightened CDM, programmatic CDM, and sectoral CDM. We proceed by briefly presenting the main features of each scenario and then highlight possible effects on the value chain which will drive future business model changes. A tightened CDM would build strongly on the current CDM but aim at improving it in two main ways. First, there are increasing debates about prioritising project types, which have demonstrated sustainable development impact such as renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects (Schneider, 2007). This would imply that technology provision and operation would be channeled in the prioritised project types while CDM incentives for search for innovative abatement opportunities elsewhere would cease. Second, several observers call for the establishment of clearer criteria regarding additionality assessments and for offering corresponding guidance to DOEs (Wara and Victor, 2008) which would probably ease the DOEs’ workload due to standardisation effects. At the same time, it is unclear what the exact impact on carbon services would be: while these services might become more standardised and hence possibly lose value, the identification and implementation of eligible CDM projects would become more challenging. Therefore, the application of up-front carbon finance approaches that trigger additional projects would certainly become more important. This would especially result in a relative gain in importance of financial intermediation and purchase activities on the primary market. Programmatic CDM extends the classical CDM by providing the possibility to aggregate many individual GHG reduction opportunities which are small to medium in size, geographically dispersed, start at different dates over a period of time and all have to use only one single CDM baseline and monitoring methodology. These design features are particularly suited for the wide deployment of specific technologies such as end-use energy-efficiency technologies (e.g., compact fluorescent lightbulbs, solar heating technologies) (Hinostroza et al., 2007). Thus, so-called programmes of activities (PoAs) could lead to the transfer and/or diffusion of particular technologies on a larger scale and provide considerable opportunities for their providers. Although the project cycle of such PoAs only has to be passed once which reduces transaction costs, carbon services are likely to be very important in order to secure the proper implementation and monitoring of the large number of small and dispersed projects. Procedures for validation and verification of a programme and its many disperse constituting activities would remain important, but would likely deviate from current practices and become more challenging due to the increased use of statistical methods such as sampling. The nature and importance of general business activities would depend strongly on whether coordinating entities that implement PoAs would be public or private. General business activities such as purchase and financial intermediation would remain important but at the same time more challenging due to the need for coordinating many similar and possibly smaller activities. While the first PoAs have been dominated by public entities, probably due to the novelty of the instrument and associated uncertainties, private-sector aggregators increasingly implement such programmes as well (Hinostroza et al., 2007). Sectoral CDM and sectoral no-lose targets (SNLTs) aim at engaging developing countries on a very large scale by focusing on entire sectors or at least large sub-sectors (Schmidt et al., 2008; Ward et al., 2008). This could result in the strongly accelerated deployment and diffusion of technologies in the respective areas. These policy tools require the establishment of a national sector baseline which can be expressed in terms of emission intensity or fixed sector emissions (Baron and Ellis, 2006). While sectoral CDM generally assumes a business as usual (BAU) baseline, SNLTs can involve a more ambitious baseline below BAU due to additional incentives in terms of financial and technological assistance (Schmidt et al., 2008). An entity representing the entire sector, i.e., the government, rather than the individual private entities would be granted credits if the sector beats the baseline and, consequently, monitoring and reporting is required on a national level. This significant deviation from the classical CDM's direct distribution of credits to private-sector entities requires governments to decide on how to incentivise the private sector to take the required actions and avoid free-riding by some sector members. The resulting incentive distribution can have important ramifications for general business activities and especially for the engagement of carbon financiers as they might be reluctant to provide up-front capital to governments in order to obtain certificates (Ward et al., 2008). This reluctance of the private sector might arise from doubts about the predictability of developing country governments’ actions. To prevent private-sector disengagement governments could establish sector-specific emission trading with links to the international carbon market which however requires considerable institutional capacities. Alternatively, one could introduce a nesting approach in which an international institutional process (akin to the current CDM) existed and credited individual on-the-ground activities. The total of any credits issued under this process would then be deducted from the amount the country was later issued for the overall sector performance (Ward et al., 2008). With such incentive distributions, carbon services and validation and verification would remain important. However, if governments decide to influence a sector's activity via a carbon tax or efficiency standards, carbon services would only be important in terms of project identification, whereas validation and verification would not occur on the project-level. Summarising, the above discussion sketched possible impacts of different policy scenarios on the carbon market's value chain8 (see Table 5). Carbon services are likely to be strongly impacted: while these services would lose some of their importance if the CDM and especially the additionality assessment is streamlined, a further tightening and especially the more widespread use of programmatic CDM would increase their importance. Opposed to that, technology provision and operation is robust in all scenarios since it is required independent of the concrete regulatory approach. This does not mean that technology provision and operation firms will necessarily obtain part of the CER revenues but that an increasing number of additional projects (either triggered through a form of CDM or sectoral approaches) will increase sales of clean technology to enable the underlying project. However, while sector-focused approaches will accelerate technology deployment and diffusion in the targeted areas, other scenarios such as classical or programmatic CDM would also strengthen incentives to search for innovative ways for abating emissions reductions in a variety of sectors. While validation and verification and general business activities remain important in classical and programmatic CDM, their importance and nature in sectoral CDM is very dependent on the incentive structure established by governments. In order to further analyse the effects of these and other proposals, several additional areas should be researched. First, as all three policy tools described above rely on crediting incentives but increase in potential size, the problem of matching developing country supply and developed country demand becomes important. An alternative is that developing countries could gain official recognition for sustainable development policies and measures (SD-PAMs) with GHG emission reduction co-benefits that they have already implemented or will implement in the future (Winkler et al., 2008). In this case, funding could be both national and international but would not need to be driven by the carbon markets.9 However, SD-PAMs would attract traditional market forces by making low-carbon technologies profitable by, e.g., removing subsidies for fossil fuels or by introducing feed-in tariffs or energy-efficiency standards. In order to analyse whether the above approaches can be implemented simultaneously, research should analyse interactions between SD-PAMs and the carbon market policy options. Second, it is important to study in detail the possibilities for maintaining the engagement of private actors in the carbon market if credits are issued on a sector-level and assigned to governments (Ward et al., 2008). Third, due to large differences in terms of economic development, technological capabilities and the current density of carbon market actors, research should examine how mixes of the above approaches including SD-PAMs can be tailored best to meet the mitigation challenge in different regions and countries. Fourth, more detailed research on the nature and strategic motivations of actors covering different aspects of the value chain step technology provision and operation such as project engineering, equipment provision and operation could help in designing policies for accelerating R&D and diffusion of mitigation technologies. It would be especially interesting to investigate in more detail how firms in the above-described clusters with technology know-how strategically integrate technology provision and operation.