Which economic model for a water-efficient Europe? Report of a CEPS Task Force. CEPS Task Force Report, 27 November 2012

This CEPS Task Force Report focuses on how to improve water efficiency in Europe, notably in public supply, households, agriculture, energy and manufacturing as well as across sectors. It presents a number of recommendations on how to make better use of economic policy instruments to sustainably manage the EU’s water resources. Published in the run-up to the European Commission’s “Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Waters”, the report contributes to the policy deliberations in two ways. First, by assessing the viability of economic policy instruments, it addresses a major shortcoming that has so far prevented the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) from becoming fully effective in practice: the lack of appropriate, coherent and effective instruments in (some) member states. Second, as the Task Force report is the result of an interactive process involving a variety of stakeholders, it is able to point to the key differences in interpreting and applying WFD principles that have led to a lack of policy coherence across the EU and to offer some pragmatic advice on moving forward.

Reviewing the EU ETS review? Report of the CEPS TAsk Force on "Does the ETS market produce the 'right' price signal"? CEPS Task Force Report, 12 November 2012

Drawing on discussions within a CEPS Task Force on the revised EU emissions trading system, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of the pros and cons of the various measures put forward by different stakeholders to address the level and stability of the price of carbon in the EU. It argues that the European Commission, the member states, the European Parliament and other stakeholders need to give serious consideration to introducing some kind of ‘dynamic’ adjustment provision to address the relatively inelastic supply. The report also suggests that there is a need to improve communication of market-sensitive information, for example by leaving the management of the ETS to a specialised body.

Quantifying the effects of perturbing the physics of an interactive sulfur scheme using an ensemble of GCMs on the climateprediction.net platform

Aerosols from anthropogenic and natural sources have been recognized as having an important impact on the climate system. However, the small size of aerosol particles (ranging from 0.01 to more than 10 μm in diameter) and their influence on solar and terrestrial radiation makes them difficult to represent within the coarse resolution of general circulation models (GCMs) such that small-scale processes, for example, sulfate formation and conversion, need parameterizing. It is the parameterization of emissions, conversion, and deposition and the radiative effects of aerosol particles that causes uncertainty in their representation within GCMs. The aim of this study was to perturb aspects of a sulfur cycle scheme used within a GCM to represent the climatological impacts of sulfate aerosol derived from natural and anthropogenic sulfur sources. It was found that perturbing volcanic SO2 emissions and the scavenging rate of SO2 by precipitation had the largest influence on the sulfate burden. When these parameters were perturbed the sulfate burden ranged from 0.73 to 1.17 TgS for 2050 sulfur emissions (A2 Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES)), comparable with the range in sulfate burden across all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SRESs. Thus, the results here suggest that the range in sulfate burden due to model uncertainty is comparable with scenario uncertainty. Despite the large range in sulfate burden there was little influence on the climate sensitivity, which had a range of less than 0.5 K across the ensemble. We hypothesize that this small effect was partly associated with high sulfate loadings in the control phase of the experiment.