The 1997 workshop of the International Association of Technology Assessment and Forecasting Institutes, IATAFI, was held in Rio de Janeiro and Buzios, Brazil. The focus of this meeting was “Technological Assessment and Zero Emissions in a Global World.”
This book presents the proceedings of this meeting, and contains many papers which examine the role of technology in achieving zero emissions, and the importance of zero emissions for sustainable development, and the ever present question of technological assessment.

The book proceeds towards the accomplishment of its goals by presenting two types of papers. The first set of papers are conceptual papers which look at the practical and conceptual issues associated with assessing technologies to achieve feasible goals. The second set of papers looks at case studies of emission reduction programs. This introduction will present some questions which frame the issues surrounding the achievement of zero emissions and technology assessment, and these questions will also help to introduce the contributions of the authors who have written the chapters of this book. It should be noted that each of the chapters makes many more contributions than are noted in this introduction, but the purpose of it is to relate these chapters to the central questions which are raised in the introduction and not to provide a detailed description of the individual chapters.

The two question which needs to be examined are, “What are assessments?” and “What are emissions?” While in some dimensions these may seem to be very simple questions, in other dimensions they are quite complex.

  Zero_Emissions_in_Global_World.pdf