This working paper explores the potential new trade opportunities and challenges that climate change mitigation policies adopted primarily in developed countries may create for exporters in Low Income Countries (LICs).

Few problems are as pressing and as existential for the world as climate change, and few have proven to be as intractable. Three decades of international negotiations on climate change have yielded little by way of action that would substantially slow, let alone reverse, human-caused climate change. Can things be different?

The Doha Climate Change Conference ended with very limited progress. The challenge is now to identify opportunities for accelerating progress towards international agreement and stronger action to limit climate change. This paper considers some of these opportunities and related issues.

While the official UNFCCC negotiations made some limited progress, encouraging developments on the margins give hope that faster progress is possible.

Countries have successfully launched a new commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, agreed a firm timetable to adopt a universal climate agreement by 2015 and agreed a path to raise necessary ambition to respond to climate change.