Organic agriculture (OA) is a concrete and promising strategy for adaptation to climate change and variability for rural communities has additional potential as a mitigation strategy.

OA is a sustainable livelihood strategy with decades of use in several climate zones and widely variable local conditions. Its financial requirements for adaptation or mitigation are low. Further research is needed on yields from OA and its mitigation and sequestration potential. Other critical aspects to consider are information provision and institutional structures.

The Economics of Climate Change: Putting a Price on Carbon

In this paper we study the process of technical change in the case of pollution abatement from large stationary sources that have been regulated by a very forceful refunded emission payment policy.

The link between institutional and market failures, rural poverty and environmental degradation suggests a ‘win-win’ policy intervention: relax local ‘constraints’ and achieve poverty alleviation and environmental goals.

Read María A. Naranjo' opinion article (Estrategias de adaptación al cambio climático en Costa Rica) in "La Nación" (January 28th), related to the EfD Central America Project "Small Farmers' Determinants of Private Adaptation to Climate Change Strategies" (Spanish only).

Colombia's discharge fee system for water effluents is often held up as a model of a well-functioning, economic incentive pollution control program in a developing country. Yet few objective evaluations of the program have appeared.

In permit trading systems, free initial allocation is common practice. A recent example is the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS).