Long Coalition Leads to Shrink? The Roles of Tipping and Technology-Sharing in Climate Clubs

TL;DR

This paper models how climate tipping points and technology-sharing influence the stability and size of international climate coalitions, revealing that technology-sharing enhances resilience and cooperation despite free-riding challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic game-theoretic model incorporating stochastic climate tipping points and proposes a technology-sharing mechanism to improve coalition stability.

Findings

Coalitions tend to shrink over time due to free-riding.

Climate tipping threats reduce stable coalition sizes.

Technology-sharing yields greater benefits than sanctions.

Abstract

Global cooperation is posited as a pivotal solution to address climate change, yet significant barriers, like free-riding, hinder its realization. This paper develops a dynamic game-theoretic model to analyze the stability of coalitions under multiple stochastic climate tippings, and a technology-sharing mechanism is designed in the model to combat free-ridings. Our results reveal that coalitions tend to shrink over time as temperatures rise, owing to potential free-ridings, despite a large size of initial coalition. The threat of climate tipping reduces the size of stable coalitions compared to the case where tipping is ignored. However, at post-tipping period, coalitions temporarily expand as regions respond to the shock, though this cooperation is short-lived and followed by further shrink. Notably, technology-sharing generates greater collective benefits than sanctions, suggesting that the proposed dynamic technology-sharing pathway bolsters coalition resilience against free-riding while limiting the global warming. This framework highlights the critical role of technology-sharing in fostering long-term climate cooperation under climate tipping uncertainties.