REPORTS ASSESSMENT REPORTS

Working Group III: Mitigation


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Deforestation
Conversion of forest to non-forest3

Demand-side management
Policies and programmes designed for a specific purpose to influence consumer demand for goods and/or services. In the energy sector, for instance, it refers to policies and programmes designed to reduce consumer demand for electricity and other energy sources. It helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Dematerialization
The process by which economic activity is decoupled from matter–energy throughput, through processes such as eco-efficient production or industrial ecology, allowing environmental impact to fall per unit of economic activity.

Deposit–refund system
Combines a deposit or fee (tax) on a commodity with a refund or rebate (subsidy) for implementation of a specified action. See also emissions tax.

Desertification
Land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities. Further, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines land degradation as a reduction or loss, in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas, of the biological or economic productivity and complexity of rain-fed cropland, irrigated cropland, or range, pasture, forest, and woodlands resulting from land uses or from a process or combination of processes, including processes arising from human activities and habitation patterns, such as: (i) soil erosion caused by wind and/or water; (ii) deterioration of the physical, chemical and biological or economic properties of soil; and (iii) long-term loss of natural vegetation.

Double dividend
The effect that revenue-generating instruments, such as a carbon tax or auctioned (tradable) carbon emission permits, can (1) limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and (2) offset at least part of the potential welfare losses of climate policies through recycling the revenue in the economy to reduce other taxes likely to be distortionary. In a world with involuntary unemployment, the climate change policy adopted may have an effect (a positive or negative “third dividend”) on employment. Weak double dividend occurs as long as there is a revenue-recycling effect; that is, as long as revenues are recycled through reductions in the marginal rates of distortionary taxes. Strong double dividend requires that the (beneficial) revenue recycling effect more than offset the combination of the primary cost and in this case, the net cost of abatement is negative. See also interaction effects.

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