Carbon Market Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Assessing Challenges and Overcoming Barriers

China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea are emerging as major players in the global carbon trading landscape. As Northeast Asia’s biggest industrial economies, these three countries are connected through deep commercial and trade ties, and shared environmental challenges. There are thus growing calls for these markets to leverage complementarities and manage differences to build a foundation for more extensive carbon market cooperation.

Against this backdrop, a new Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) report, Carbon Market Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Assessing Challenges and Overcoming Barriers— which is part of ASPI’s Toward a Northeast Asia Carbon Market initiative — draws on the expertise of a wide range of scholars and practitioners to help equip policymakers and other stakeholders with information and guidance on the potential of and pathway toward carbon market linkage in Northeast Asia.

This volume, released in June 2018, includes 11 chapters that examine the challenges of and approaches to carbon market cooperation and linkage in Northeast Asia. The report begins with four chapters focused on the status of carbon markets in the region, with examinations of how legal and institutional frameworks can facilitate the varying national and local measures employed to strengthen links and yield dividends. Chapters five through seven describe the barriers to linkage, and the uneven impacts — whether positive or negative — of linkage across the region, and also identify opportunities to pursue other forms of non-traditional linkage pathways. The remainder of the volume is organized around the particularities of emissions trading system policies and goals in China and Japan, with the final chapter making the case for the importance of business sector involvement in linkage efforts.