This workshop was addressed to researchers and PhD students in economics interested in natural resource and environmental economics. 

The January 13 workshop hosted Julie Metta-Versmessen, PhD candidate in economics, KU Leuven and Nicolas Pinsonneault, Ph.D. student, HEC Montréal.

• Managing Municipal Solid Waste with low citizen involvement : the case of Hong Kong - Julie Metta-Versmessen

Résumé : While the waste sector has significant decarbonization potential, deploying this potential is difficult in the absence of citizen participation and involvement. In this paper the political management of the waste sector is studied for the case of Hong Kong. Using Weitzman’s theorem and extensions, both marginal abatement and damage curves are built to analyse which policy would be the most suitable. From our analysis, we first show that involving citizens in waste reduction and sorting is the main issue for waste management in Hong Kong. Second, we derive that the first best scenario to regulate waste in this context would be through a quantity-based control system. We then detail how this Waste Permit Trading System should be developed to regulate the waste amount in this region. We characterize a system consisting of both landfill permits and recycling credits. We determine the optimal number of permits and credits for the different agents as well as a potential market design that allows for a future linking with a carbon trading system.

• Tradable Climate Liabilities with Investment in Green Technology - Nicolas Pinsonneault

I build upon the tradable climate liabilities framework by Billette de Villemeur & Leroux (2019) whereby countries have the possibility to participate in a financially binding climate agreement where they can accumulate, and trade liabilities based on their cumulative per- period emissions and where revenues are used to compensate the coalition's participating countries. Those countries can submit compensation claims based on their share of global damages. The initial model is extended to allow countries to invest in green technology. The goal of this ongoing project will be to study the incentives to invest in such technologies under a tradable climate liabilities mechanism and compare them to those that emerge from other more traditional climate policies.

Référence : de Villemeur, E. B., & Leroux, J. (2019). Tradable climate liabilities: a thought experiment. Ecological Economics, 164, 106355.