Excludable Benefits Resulting from the Mitigation Alliance

The successful implementation of the Mitigation Alliance (MA) requires for its members to fully commit to the MA’s aggregate, ambitious Net Zero Carbon (NZC) target. While it is unlikely for such a target to be based only upon the ‘good will’ of MA members, coercive measures to bind them to their assigned mitigation quotas (so–called ‘sticks’ within the climate club literature) would have no impact in a context where voluntary participation represents a key pillar for MA membership. Indeed the benefits offered by the recognition of the Certified Mitigation Outcome (CMO) as representative currency within the MA represent a significant stimulus for entities to converge towards the MA targets, yet this is not likely to suffice without additional, excludable co-benefits. As a matter of fact, the MA has been designed to guarantee a significant variety of co-benefits. While their effectiveness cannot be anticipated without verification of the effects of the MA, evidence resulting from previous climate governance experiments and the abundant literature discussing possible co-benefits linked to climate policies and strategies may well serve to outline the opportunities offered by the MA. This Chapter describes these opportunities and provides a first analysis of their actual effectiveness.