Robert Smith Statistics Canada October 20, 2010 Environmental and Socio- Economic Linkages – Drivers, Impacts, Adaptation and Instruments Discussants comments

Some general thoughts  Three excellent papers – congratulations to the authors  The papers demonstrate the value of integrating environmental and economic to address policy questions Unfortunately, it is not always possible to carry out this integration because of incompatibilities Environmental statisticians need to give this more attention Environmental accounts are one means of building integrated data

Comments for Bye and Bruvoll  Important topic and one that deserves attention Statistics Norway’s leadership in this regard is welcome  Agree that consistent measurement is crucial As such, would have liked to see more focus on basic concepts; e.g., what defines an environmental tax; how are instruments to be classified  Good summary of the range of instruments and possible data sources

Thoughts for improving the paper  A multi-dimensional cube is a good way to organize data But do processes make sense as the third dimension? Wouldn’t the various instruments make more sense? The discussion of the elements of the cube (a ijk ) at the end of paragraph 2 on page 2 could be clearer

Thoughts for improving the paper  Effort to precisely define environmental taxes is very welcome Is comparing them with marginal externalities or abatement costs correct? Average costs could make more sense, since the idea of the tax is to internalize the full external cost Does it make sense to limit environment taxes in this way at all? Taxes can have many purposes in addition to internalizing costs; e.g., capping emissions

Comments for Kokic  Very interesting paper with some nice empirical modelling results  Fully agree that assessment of climate vulnerability must take into account both impacts and adaptive capacity Would temperature change not also be an important impact variable?  Support very much the use of the capital model for evaluating adaptive capacity

Thoughts for improving the paper  Is the fact that Australian farmers are adapted already to climate variability any comfort for the future if climate variability changes due to global warming?  Variability in farm income may only be partially correlated with climate variability. Farm income is affected by non-climate processes, especially agricultural commodity prices

Thoughts for improving the paper  More discussion would be welcome in the paper to allow the reader to understand the methods underlying the analysis The weighting of the adaptive capacity variables into a single figure could be discussed further It is not clear how the vulnerability measures in Figure 2 have been derived, particularly for farm income variability Given the dramatic conclusions about the vulnerability to farm income variability, greater clarity would be welcome

Comments for Schenau  Very interesting paper with nice examples of the policy relevance of environmental accounting  Demonstrates very clearly the power of integrated environmental and economic data The analyses presented are not possible without environmental accounts

Thoughts for improving the paper  The addition of the DPSIR framework adds little value The SEEA framework stands on its own without need for DPSIR  Must be careful not to exaggerate the power of environmental accounts Sub-national analysis with the SEEA is more difficult than the comment on page 6 would suggest Air emissions accounts beyond GHGs can be difficult to establish because of weaknesses in basic data Not every country compiles I-O tables and timeliness can be a concern Evaluating cost-effectiveness of mitigation policies with SEEA is limited because attribution of changes in emissions to specific policy initiatives is difficult

Thoughts for improving the paper  Be explicit about modelling assumptions Particularly in cases where assumptions must be about the emission intensity of production in foreign countries In Canada, we have found that emissions of GHGs associated with our Chinese imports are several times higher than for similar domestic production Could a core set of climate change indicators be selected from among the various measures presented? Not all audiences are able to work with technically detailed statistics