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 differentiating the countries according to risk dissemination and risk assimilation categories, which are so crucial in framing effective LCG policies. Empirical results reveal that under the proposed grand regional bloc comprising of 20 Asian countries, eight countries are identified as predominantly geo-environmental risk assimilators, one risk neutral, while the rest of the countries are identified as predominantly risk disseminators. Empirical results also show that synergy effect 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.