| Approach | Environmental effectiveness | Cost-effectiveness | Meets distributional considerations | Institutional feasibility |
|---|
| National emission targets and international emission trading (including offsets) | Depends on participation and compliance. | Decreases with limited participation and reduced gas and sector coverage. | Depends on initial allocation. | Depends on capacity to prepare inventories and compliance. Defections weaken regime stability. |
| Sectoral agreements | Not all sectors amenable to such agreements, thereby limiting overall effectiveness. Effectivenss depends on whether agreement is binding or non-binding. | Lack of trading across sectors increases overall costs, although they may be cost-effective within individual sectors. Competitive concerns reduced within each sector. | Depends on participation. Within-sector competitiveness concerns are alleviated if treated equally at global level. | Requires many separate decisions and technical capacity. Each sector may require cross-country institutions to manage agreements. |
| Coordinated policies and measures | Individual measures can be effective; emission levels may be uncertain; success will be a function of compliance. | Depends on policy design. | Extent of coordination could limit national flexibility, but may increase equity. | Depends on the number of countries (easier among smaller groups of countries than at the global level). |
| Cooperation on Technology RD&Da | Depends on funding, when technologies are developed and policies for diffusion. | Varies with degree of R&D risk. Cooperation reduces individual national risk. | Intellectual property concerns may negate the benefits of cooperation. | Requires many separate decisions. Depends on research capacity and long-term funding. |
| Development-oriented actions | Depends on national policies and design to create synergies. | Depends on the extent of synergies with other development objectives. | Depends on distributional effects of development policies. | Depends on priority given to sustainable development in national policies and goals of national institutions. |
| Financial mechanisms | Depends on funding selection criteria. | Depends on country and project type. | Depends on project and country. | Depends on national institutions. |
| Capacity building | Varies over time and depends on critical mass. | Depends on programme design. | Depends on selection of recipient group. | Depends on country and institutional frameworks. |
| a Research, Development and Demonstration. |