Developing countries are rapidly increasing their emissions of greenhouse gases, which can have serious adverse effects on climate change mitigation efforts.  The international diffusion of Climate Change Mitigation Technologies (CCMTs) can help mitigating the negative effects of developing countries’ rising emissions. However, supporting the diffusion of CCMTs poses difficult coordination challenges for developed and developing nations as is confronts them with hard to solve economic and environmental dilemmas. In addition, the rate and scope of technological change is inherently deeply uncertain.  

This research incorporates these different elements into a quantitative policy research framework that studies the long-term effectiveness and vulnerability of international cooperation mechanisms for supporting the diffusion of CCMTs. This framework uses a multi-country endogenous technological change model to account for the relevant economic and technological processes that lead the international diffusion of CCMTs. Then, it uses exploratory modeling and the Robust Decision Making methodology to identify cost-effective and robust coordination mechanisms that can effectively support the diffusion of these technologies. The model is used in a computational experiment that creates a large ensemble of future scenarios that explore a vast space of economic, technological and environmental uncertainties. This large database of future scenarios is then analyzed using statistical clustering algorithms to identify the factors that increase or reduce the vulnerability of different coordination mechanisms. Finally,  the vulnerability of coordination mechanisms is analyzed in light of economic and environmental criteria, such as economic costs and benefits of policies and resulting greenhouse gas emissions.

Keywords: climate change mitigation technologies, developing countries, international climate technology policies, technological uncertainties.