JOINT IMPLEMENTATION - THE BASE-LINE ISSUE - ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

The efficiency of Joint Implementation (JI) can be seriously hampered as investors and hosts of JI projects want to achieve maximum emission reduction. To avoid overstatement of emission reduction, it becomes n ecessary to define the emission that would have occurred without the p roject - the 'baseline'. The possibility of quantifying indirect effec ts and market distortions through aggregation in country-related basel ines is weighed up by the uncertainty of the assumptions required in a n aggregate baseline scenario. Thus, project-specific baseline scenari os are recommended as a basis for JI. The paper surveys some baselines of current JI pilot projects and finds serious flaws. (C) 1998 Elsevi er Science Ltd. All rights reserved.