The EU is considering implementing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. To inform the policy decision, we assess eight energy-intensive trade-exposed sectors in depth to distill what their characteristics imply for the shape of an ideal mechanism. The results highlight the difficulty of finding...

This brief aims to highlight some of the difficulties involved in elaborating a working border carbon adjustment (BCA) regime. It demonstrates both the tensions between the various possible BCA objectives and the necessarily imperfect options that are available for bridging the tension between...

One of the key threads in the UNFCCC discussions has been reducing the negative impacts of the implementation of response measures. This paper explores how that might be accomplished by means of trade-related economic diversification policies. It explores the new realities of trade distributed...

This paper is one of a series of five outputs produced under the Food Security and Climate Change Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). It surveys the key trade issues in the ongoing negotiations addressing agriculture as a sectoral approach to mitigation...

For Canadian policy makers, the relatively straightforward economics of a border carbon adjustment (BCA) is complicated in practice by four challenges. First, Canadian carbon-pricing regimes have been developed from the bottom up, being primarily designed at the provincial rather than the...