While mitigation efforts in developed and emerging economies are necessary in order to meet ambitious climate targets, the international community strives to explore strategies to help the most vulnerable populations to cope with the short-term and long-term impacts of climate change. In the perspective of the 21st COP of the UNFCCC (Paris, December 2015), this Special Issue on ‘Climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing and transition countries’ addresses two complementary topical issues. On the one hand, migration – international and internal – and remittances are analyzed as adaptation strategies for vulnerable households and individuals. On the other hand, climate policies in emerging economies are examined in light of their distributional impacts for households and of the strategic issues they may raise. This special issue introduces five papers with a diversity of approaches, e.g., game theory, econometric modeling and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling.

Is international migration an adaptation strategy to sudden or gradual climatic shocks? In this paper we investigate the direct and the indirect role of climatic shocks in developing countries as a determinant of out-migration flows toward rich OECD countries in the period 1990–2001. Contrarily to the bulk of existing studies, we use a macro approach and explicitly consider the heterogeneity of climatic shocks (type, size, sign of shocks and seasonal effects). Our results show that the occurrence of adverse climatic events in origin countries has significative direct and indirect effects on out-migration from poor to rich countries.

This study explores three-way linkage between weather, agricultural performance and internal migration in India at the state and district level using census data. The estimations are based on a two-stage least squares model using panel data. The elasticity of the inter-state out-migration rate with respect to per capita net state domestic agricultural product is − 0.775, indicating that a decline in the value of agricultural output related to weather variations results in an increase in out-migration rate. The crop-wise analysis shows that a 1 per cent decline in rice (wheat) yield leads to a nearly 2 per cent (1 per cent) increase in the rate of out-migration from a state. The district-level analysis shows larger magnitudes of estimated change in in-migration rates to relative changes in crop yields. However, the district-level analysis using two-period panel data constructed from a single census provides relatively less robust results compared to the state-level analysis owing to the associated data limitations.

We investigate the consequences of remittances inflows on the macroeconomic performance of West African countries over the 1985–2007 period. We take into account the exposure of those countries to climate variability by estimating a PCHVAR model which allows heterogeneity between countries’ responses to rainfall shocks. Our results show that the impact of remittances on macroeconomic performance is highly sensitive to those shocks. In particular, when drought conditions prevail, remittances no longer exert any short-term spillover effects on growth and may increase a situation of economic dependence, by spurring agricultural imports.

In order to significantly reduce global carbon emissions, it is necessary also to control CO2 emissions in fast growing emerging economies such as India. The question is how the Indian economy would be affected by including the country in an international climate regime. In this analysis we soft-link a global and a single-country computable general equilibrium model in order to be able to capture distributional issues as well as international repercussions. We analyze different options of transferring revenues from domestic carbon taxes and international transfers to different household types and the effects of different assumptions on exchange rates on transfer payments. Our results show (i) that welfare effects can differ significantly for different household types, which is generally ignored in analyses with global models, and (ii) that these effects are significantly influenced by international price repercussions and by accounting for transfers from international permit sales which is generally ignored in single-country models.

We investigate the interaction between a developed country that imports a carbon-intensive product, such as electricity, and a transitioning economy that exports the product. Production of the good generates a transboundary externality related to climate change; if this externality is priced improperly, the application of a feed-in tariff or border tax adjustment can provide an indirect policy instrument. We analyze the application of such a measure in a stark model where the importing country cares about climate-related damages while the exporting country does not; this can be viewed as reflecting a scenario where the (developed) importing country is more concerned about climate change than is the (transitioning) exporting economy. Because climate change will occur over a long time frame, the problem is dynamic. In this modeling context, we describe the manner in which the (second-best) tariff-cum-border tax adjustment relates to the carbon stock.