Identifying Countries for Regional Cooperation in Low Carbon Growth: A Geo-environmental Impact Index

This paper proposes a new geo-environmental Impact index to quantify the implications and dynamics for a country to join in a regional cooperation for low carbon growth (LCG) in Asia. The index helps diferentiating the countries according to risk dissemination and risk assimilation categories, which are so crucial in framing efective LCG policies. Empirical results reveal that under the proposed grand regional bloc comprising of 20 Asian countries, eight countries are identifed as predominantly geo-environmental risk assimilators, one risk neutral, while the rest of the countries are identifed as predominantly risk disseminators. Empirical results also show that synergy efect is evident in all the regional or sub-regional groupings. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the proposed grand regional bloc would yield higher possibility for reducing CO2 emissions in the respective countries as compared to the actions taken by separate sub-regional groupings. The proposed model can also be used as an imperative tool in resolving the regional disputes under the climate change negotiations.