Are you interested in learning more about transboundary environmental issues, such as trans-frontier pollution and climate change? Explore the Venice lectures held by Henry Tulkens to the students of the PhD Program in Science and Management of Climate Change, now extended and carefully rewritten in this forthcoming book. Foreword by Prof. Carlo Carraro.

The science and management of environmental problems is a vast area, comprising both the natural and social sciences, and the multidisciplinary links often make these issues challenging to comprehend. The forthcoming book Economics, Game Theory and International Environmental Agreements: The Ca’ Foscari Lectures aims to introduce students to the multidimensional character of international environmental problems in general, and climate change in particular.

The book is an extended and carefully rewritten version of the lectures held by Henry Tulkens (Center for Operations Research and Econometrics – CORE, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) for the students of the PhD Program in Science and Management of Climate Change at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Ecology, economics, game theory and diplomacy are called upon and brought together in the common framework of a basic mathematical model. Within that framework, and using tools from these four disciplines, the book develops a theory that aims to explain and promote cooperation in international environmental affairs.

Other books on the topic tend to be research-oriented volumes of various papers. Instead, this is a book that offers a reasonably-sized synthesis of the multidimensional societal problems of transfrontier pollution, particularly of climate change. It uses mathematical modeling of economic and game theory concepts to examine these environmental issues and demonstrate many results in an accessible fashion. Readers interested in understanding the links between ecology and economics, as well as the connection between economics and institutional decision-making, will find in this text not only answers to many of their queries but also questions for further thinking.

As underlined by Prof. Carlo Carraro in the Foreword of the book “In the real world, a large number of international environmental agreements on global commons was signed […] How can we explain that some countries decide to sign an international environmental agreement even when they could enjoy the same environmental benefit by letting other countries to abate? In other words, when the environment is a public good, a country that does not abate achieves — without paying any cost — the same environmental benefit of signatories who decide to abate. Is this enough to conclude that there is no incentive for countries to sign an international environmental agreement, i.e. that the outcome of the negotiation process will be a situation without any environmental cooperation? This book, consistently with the most advanced literature on international environmental agreements, provides a negative answer to this last question. Indeed, by applying the appropriate concepts of coalitional stability, it shows that cooperation can emerge even when the environment is a public good and when each country decides independently, voluntarily and without any forms of commitment and/or repeated interaction”.

The book gives importance not only to the theoretical tools necessary to analyze environmental agreements, but also to the empirical models and to their dynamic features. This is a very relevant research area, confirmed by the Nobel Prize awarded in 2018 to William Nordhaus, the first scholar to develop, jointly with Zili Yang, a dynamic model of the world economy designed to analyze climate change policies. The model presented in this book is an evolution of Nordhaus’ model, enriched and more reliable. In addition, students are offered the possibility to use Tulkens’ model, which is freely available.

Book Contents:

•  Foreword (by Carlo Carraro)
• Preface
• About the Author
• Two Introductory Notions
•  The Economic-Ecological Reference Model
• Economic Theory Concepts
• Game Theory Concepts
•  The Global Externality Game I: Its γ-Core
• The Global Externality Game II: Its CT Solution
• The Dynamic Global Externality Game
• The Dynamic Global Externality Game in Numbers: The CWS Model
• Internal Coalitional Stability and the Global Externality Game
•  The UNFCCC Process: An Economic and Game Theoretic Interpretation

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