Narrow Results

A Bayesian Network approach to developing effective policies for more sustainable rural land use and development is presented which:

• incorporates several different stakeholder viewpoints

• integrates and balances the results from different viewpoints, and thus facilitates compromise land use solutions

• elucidates the main factors affecting stakeholders' decisions, on which policy levers will operate more effectively

• allows differences between "expected change" and "observed change" to be understood as arising from uncertainty and variation about "the average situation"

• demonstrates the crucial roles of beliefs and uncertainties in determining the preferred options of different groups

• emphasises the need to know the beliefs and uncertainties of local land managers

• incorporates public participation and social learning while such necessary data are gathered.

The approach's merits for fostering pro-active policy design and subsidiarity, and for focusing the research needed to underpin rural policy are discussed.

China’s national emission trading scheme (ETS) started operating in 2021 after four years of preparation. In the initial stage of national ETS, benchmarking approach is one of the hottest topics that have gained sufficient attention. For the reason that benchmarks will greatly affect the permits allocation results and thus affect the effectiveness of the carbon market. This paper attempts to investigate the impacts of the benchmark designs of China’s ETS by using plant-level data. Main results show that the current lax benchmark standards adopted by the national ETS will lead to excess surplus of permits. The whole carbon market will achieve market clearance only when the benchmark standards are set as high as the top 2% efficiency levels. If the carbon price is 200yuan/ton, the annual trading volume will be 16.4 billion yuan and 13.2 billion yuan in extra will be spent on carbon offsetting for compliance. If the auction mechanism is introduced, the total market size will significantly increase. The auction revenue will exceed 300 billion yuan when 50% of permits are allocated through auction and will exceed 600 billion yuan when all permits are auctioned. These revenues can provide sufficient funds to accelerate China’s low-carbon transformation as well as improve social welfare.