STEFAN GRUBER, University of Sydney - Faculty of Law
Email: gruber.st@web.de

Climate change poses a severe threat to many cultural heritage sites. Threats include floods, increasing thunderstorms and rainfall, desertification, deterioration of permafrost and the decay of cultural landscapes. Protecting cultural heritage sites proves to be very difficult because they are as diverse as the threats from climate change. This paper argues that laws from different areas of environmental law such as heritage conservation law, pollution law, land use law, construction law, water law, environmental impact assessment law and planning law must be used in an integrated way to form a comprehensive system of legal instruments and enforcement mechanisms in order to minimise the effects of global climate change on heritage properties.

A. DENNY ELLERMAN, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management
Email: ellerman@mit.edu

The European Union's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the world's first multinational cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. As an agreement between sovereign nations with diverse historical, institutional, and economic circumstances, it can be seen as a prototype for an eventual global climate regime. Interestingly, the problems that are often seen as dooming a global trading system - international financial flows and institutional readiness - haven't appeared in the EU ETS, at least not yet. The more serious problems that emerge from the brief experience of the EU ETS are those of (1) developing a central coordinating organization, (2) devising side benefits to encourage participation, and (3) dealing with the interrelated issues of harmonization, differentiation, and stringency. The pre-existing organizational structure and membership benefits of the European Union provided convenient and almost accidental solutions to the need for a central institution and side benefits, but these solutions will not work on a global scale and there are no obvious substitutes. Furthermore, the EU ETS is only beginning to test the practicality of harmonizing allocations within the trading system, differentiating responsibilities among participants, and increasing the stringency of emissions caps. The trial period of the EU ETS punted on these problems, as was appropriate for a trial period, but they are now being addressed seriously. From a global perspective, the answers that are being worked out in Europe will say a great deal about what will be feasible on a broader, global scale.

ANDREAS ZIEGLER, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich - Department of Management, Technology, and Economics (D-MTEC), University of Zurich
Email: andziegler@ethz.ch

Based on a unique firm-level data set from the German manufacturing sector, this paper disentangles environmental and non-environmental product and process innovations. The multivariate probit analysis shows that the various innovation types are determined by different factors. The estimation results suggest a policy mix which comprises the encouragement of R&D activities, certified management systems, and specific management activities referring to environmentally friendly products when the implementation of all innovation types is to be supported.

CYRIL FOUILLET, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) - Solvay Business School, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD/LPED), French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP)
Email: cyril.fouillet@gmail.com

With 70% of poor Indians working in agriculture, this sector is one of the pillars of the national poverty reduction strategy. Given it represents 20% of GDP and 60% of employment; it is difficult to imagine how India could strive for equitable growth without revitalizing the agricultural sector.

Microfinance, defined as the provision of financial services (loans, savings, insurance and money transfers) to people excluded from the banking sector, is often invoked as the solution for financing rural India. But financing of small farms and, more broadly of the agricultural sector, is difficult for numerous reasons. Banking institutions must face a variety of obstacles: insufficient infrastructure resulting in high transaction costs; covariance risks related to climate, price fluctuations and markets; lack of experience in evaluating the value of produce they are asked to finance; low education levels of farmers and farm laborers; and difficulties securing guarantees, to name but a few.
Our research addresses the financing of Indian agriculture. It describes the localization and evolution of financing in this sector while attempting to determine the role of microfinance. The objective is to advance knowledge of both agricultural finance and microfinance by integrating the spatial element. Cartographic analysis and symbol maps cross several variables and permit us to better visualize the extremely heterogeneous situation in this country, which concentrates one-sixth of humanity.

Our results show that the supply of rural and agricultural finance is subject to considerable territorial inequalities. Supply tends to concentrate in richer regions with two consequences:
i) reinforcement of existing territorial inequalities; ii) and the risk of saturation and client overindebtedness.

Following the reforms of the banking sector in the 1990's, the Indian bank network contracted, causing a part of the population to see their access to banks cut off. While the liberalization of the sector favored urban and semi-urban zones, agricultural and rural finance have suffered. Even more alarming is that zones already underserved prior to the 1990's reforms seem to be particularly affected by this debancarization phenomenon. Furthermore, the spatial comparison of the supply of microfinance and bank services with agricultural activity shows that microfinance covers very few of the least banked zones in the country.