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Klimaændringer opfattes af klimaeksperter som et alvorligt globalt miljøproblem, der nødvendiggør massiv indgriben. Den folkelige opbakning synes dog ikke at reflektere denne bekymring. Spørgsmålet er, hvorfor der er denne forskel i risikoopfattelsen. Uenigheden mellem eksperter og lægmænd er vigtig at forstå, da den kan have alvorlige konsekvenser for effektiviteten af den førte klimapolitik. Kombinationen af økonomisk beslutningsteori og adfærdspsykologi kan give et bud på, hvorfor ikke-eksperter har en anden risikovurdering end eksperter. Hvis politikere, af vælgerhensyn, i det mindste delvist baserer klimapolitikken på ikke- eksperters vurdering, betyder det, at der er en stor risiko for en fejlslagen klimapolitik. En ændret og bedre kommunikation af klimaproblemets risikoprofil kunne imidlertid harmonisere klimaeksperter og befolkningens risikoopfattelse og dermed fremme en effektiv klimapolitisk indsats.

This paper considers the policy outcome of a contest between two opposing in-terest groups: the incumbent fishermen and a group of conservationalists. The objective of the fishermen is to maximize profit, and they are (partly) concerned over future profitability as well, while the conservationalists have the aim of re-ducing current fishing effort in order to protect fish resources. The probability of a result of overfishing is dependent on the relative benefits the two groups receive if their preferred policy wins the contest. This model enables us to pre-dict how climate change induces changes in the underlying bionomic model and affects the probability of conservation. The main result is that the likelihood of conservation increases when climate change implies a larger percentage in-crease in the conservation value to the conservationalists than the percentage increase in the commercial value for the fishermen.

This paper seeks to investigate the following issues: What is the resulting out-come, when regulation is determined by interest groups that compete for influ-ence over the regulatory process? Given this, can we predict how climate change related changes in the underlying biological factors will affect the be-haviour of the interest groups and the resulting regulatory outcome.

When abatement costs are uncertain, but correlated, and a country becomes pri-vately informed that costs are low, then unilateral actions serve as a signalling devise to reveal low costs and unilateral actions have the potential to trigger positive responses abroad. However, the country engaging in unilateral actions is the one with the highest expectation about the other countries' reactions, and it might suffer from an effect like the winners curse.

Both Barrett (1991) and Hoel (1991) show that uniform solutions cannot guarantee that the IR constraint is satisfied. This drawback of uniform solutions dramatically reduces feasibility of uniform solutions. However, when uniform reductions are property specified, this conclusion is no longer valid. Compared to Barrett (1991), which proposes a uniform absolute reduction, this paper proposes uniform solutions that are defined as equal percentage reduction compared to some pre-agreement reduction level, in accordance with real world specification. For such a specification, uniform solutions that satisfy IR will always exist, establishing a new, and more positive, view upon uniform solutions.

This paper deals with risk and uncertainties that are an inherent part of designing and implementing fisheries rebuilding plans. Such risk and uncertainties stem from a variety of sources, biological, economic and/or political factors, and are influenced by external factors like changing environmental conditions. The aim of this paper is to characterize such risks and uncertainties and to assess the importance of it in relation to the performance of fisheries rebuilding plans, to give some examples where uncertainties have negatively affected the ability of rebuilding plans to reach their intended targets and to give some guidelines how to deal with risk and uncertainties.

Deliberation may increase the quality of decisions but also necessarily takes time and effort and hence will have costs. But proponents of deliberative democracy as an attractive or superior method for making decisions almost all focus on presumed benefits while in practice ignoring the costs associated with investing time and resources in the process of deliberation. We show that the cost side significantly influences the performance of the deliberative process. Through a number of simulations, we demonstrate that there must be a certain point beyond which the costs of deliberating will outweigh the potential benefits. Since this type of processes invariably will be time consuming, especially when the convergence of the participants towards a common goal is slow, conditions are derived where the deliberative process performs relatively well or relatively poorly, both as concerns the probability of reaching an agreement and in the net benefits to the participants. This is especially the case when the number of participants increase.

The Rio+20 conference in 2012 called for goals of promoting green industries and improving the quality of institutions worldwide. Is a global CO 2 tax the best global solution for achieving this twin goal? As most countries in the world are highly corrupt, an adequate regulatory instrument should be able to work in a simple way that does not rely on strong formal institutions for enforcement. We argue that this is the case for a global CO2 tax. A uniform CO2 tax can be introduced as a "painted" energy tax that provides the needed incentive to switch from brown to green industries and minimizes the risk of carbon leakage. The achievement of the specific 2-degree target level is discussed as an example implying huge tax revenues that may be invested in better institutions. In perspective, the idea of having one instrument solving one problem will probably ease forthcoming political discussions and sustainability conferences substantially since the focus is on one issue rather than many.