Environmental Policy
Faculty
M. Yamaguchi
H. Kudo
Description
The aim of this course is to integrate the theory of environmental policy and its practice. Usually at the university lectures, students will learn pure environmental theory and its application to environmental policy. However, theory is based on a peculiar case where every person acts as homo-economics and all information is shared among participants to market. This is not the case in a real world. For the environmental policy to be effective, decision makers must consider various factors that are different from the situation assumed by the theory. In addition, economic efficiency is just one of the factors to be considered.
This course will proceed with a mixture of lectures and discussions with students, mainly focusing on climate change. Contents may be changed according to students’ interests and knowledge.
The purpose of environmental policy and its measures will be explained for the first three classes, followed by climate change issues. As energy issues are closely related with climate change, lectures on energy policies both in Japan and in Europe will be given. Then background and contents of the Kyoto Protocol and its implication for Japan and the world will be discussed, followed by discussions with students on the Japanese and European implementation plans of the Kyoto Protocol. Several EU directives (mainly those of European Climate Change Programme ) will be used for the comparison purpose with Japanese policy. Thereafter, discussion will be focused on future international framework (Post-Kyoto Framework) with the view of how to invite the United States participation there.
If time allows, importance of technological innovation and diffusion, the relationship between sustainable development and climate change, priority of climate change and cost benefit analysis, can be taken up. Also, as one of the lecturers of this course is a lead author of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 4 th assessment report, some discussion on the report will be given.