DECISION THEATER on SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY

Investors’ Signals for 2°C

The targets of the Paris Agreement make it necessary to redirect finance flows towards sustainable, low-carbon infrastructures and technologies. Currently, the potential of institutional investors to help finance this transition is widely discussed. Thus, this paper takes a closer look at influence factors for green investment decisions of large European insurance companies. With a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, the importance of policy, market and civil society signals is evaluated. In summary, respondents favor measures that promote green investment, such as feed-in tariffs or adjustments of capital charges for green assets, over ones that make carbon-intensive investments less attractive, such as the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies or a carbon price. While investors currently see a low impact of the carbon price, they rank a substantial reform as an important signal for the future. Respondents also emphasize that policy signals have to be coherent and credible to coordinate expectations.

Weblink to the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20430795.2018.1528809

ICT and Climate: A Digital Structure for the Energy Transition

The Global Climate Forum and Fraunhofer IEE have published a perspective on a digital structure of the energy transition in the journal “GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society”. The work described in the article is conducted within the Kopernikus project ENavi which develops a navigation system that helps to identify and tackle critical transitions in the German Energy Transition. The Global Climate Forum, Fraunhofer IEE and its partners explores the possible roles of communication technologies in the future energy system as well the opportunities that digitalisation processes create with regard to electricity, thermal energy and mobility. In a mobile visualisation environment, GCF discusses scenario-based narratives of a transformation to a more sustainable mobility with stakeholders in an interactive setting.

Weblink to the perspective paper: https://globalclimateforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GAIA4_2018_401_ENavi.pdf