A Conference at Cornell University

It is now recognized that Carbon Offsets should play a major role in Climate Policy, by providing cost-effective reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sequestering carbon. However, there are many challenges associated with the production of offsets, including its verification, as well as issues related to additionality, leakage and permanence. At the same time, there is also a need to guide the design of public policies that will regulate the market for carbon offsets.

Yet the challenges of implementing carbon offsets and the role that carbon offsets can play in climate policy is under-researched:

• (i) There is insufficient theoretical work that integrates the various challenges associated with the production of offsets – leakage, additionality, permanence - in a unified framework; the potential interactions between these challenges need to be analyzed in depth;
• (ii) There is limited empirical evidence of the magnitudes of leakage and additionality associated with various carbon offset projects for different countries;
• (iii) There is virtually no work on the effectiveness of various public policies that regulate the market for carbon offsets, through standards (e.g. quality or quantity limits), or other ‘mechanism-design’ type policies;
• (iv) The interactions between cap-and-trade systems, voluntary consumption of offsets, and the production of carbon offsets needs to be better understood. Specifically, potential unintended emissions or welfare consequences need to be identified and measured. And the voluntary consumption of offsets remains under researched;
• (v) The distributional impacts associated with the production of carbon offsets needs to be better understood, especially for the agriculture and forestry sectors.

With this background, Cornell University will host a major international conference – “The Role of Carbon Offsets in Climate Policy: Theory and Practice”.

The conference organizers are Antonio Bento and Ravi Kanbur of the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University. The conference will discuss theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented papers. The suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the issues (i)-(v) highlighted above.

The organizers invite the submission of completed papers or substantive abstracts (3-5 pages) by December 15, 2010. Submissions should be sent electronically to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Decisions will be communicated by January 15, 2011. Participants who can use their own funds to cover part or all of the cost of their participation are requested to do so.

The conference will provide accommodation and economy class travel for one presenter per paper accepted for those who do not have funding. Please indicate with your submission what funding you need. 2 It is the organizers’ intention to publish a high quality publication - a special issue of a journal or an academic press volume - based on papers selected from the conference. Those authors who wish to have their papers considered for publication will be invited after the conference to submit their paper for refereeing if they wish to do so.