The role of private finance in meeting adaptation infrastructure investment needs has been widely emphasised in climate policy debates. This new paper Mobilising private finance for coastal adaptation: a literature review in WIREs Climate Change reviews the scientific literature on the issue. The paper thus provides a perspective from the current literature on the questions of what promotes private investment in coastal adaptation and how can public actors’ interest in adaptation be aligned with private investor interests. Read more

Reaching the Sustainable Development Goals requires a fundamental socio-economic transformation accompanied by substantial investment in low-carbon infrastructure. Such a sustainability transition represents a non-marginal change, driven by behavioral factors and systemic interactions.
However, typical economic models used to assess a sustainability transition focus on marginal changes around a local optimum, which—by construction—lead to negative effects. Thus, these models do not allow evaluating a sustainability transition that might have substantial positive effects. This paper examines which mechanisms need to be included in a standard computable general equilibrium model to overcome these limitations and to give a more comprehensive view of the effects of climate change mitigation.

Weblink to the paper: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/12/2221

This paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences evaluates current stakeholder involvement (SI) practices in science through a web-based survey among scholars and researchers engaged in sustainability or transition research. It substantiates previous conceptual work with evidence from practice by building on four ideal types of SI in science. The results give an interesting overview of the varied landscape of SI in sustainability science, ranging from the kinds of topics scientists work on with stakeholders, over scientific trade-offs that arise in the field, to improvements scientists wish for. Furthermore, the authors describe a discrepancy between scientists’ ideals and practices when working with stakeholders. On the conceptual level, the data reflect that the democratic type of SI is the predominant one concerning questions on the understanding of science, the main goal, the stage of involvement in the research process, and the science–policy interface. The fact that respondents expressed agreement to several types shows they are guided by multiple and partly conflicting ideals when working with stakeholders. We thus conclude that more conceptual exchange between practitioners, as well as more qualitative research on the concepts behind practices, is needed to better understand the stakeholder–scientist nexus.

Weblink to the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/20/1706085114.short

An article, published in the journal “Nature Climate Change” on March 27th 2017. The authors, Stefano Battiston, Antoine Mandel, Irene Monasterolo, Franziska Schütze and Gabriele Visentin, have developed a “climate stress-test” of the financial system. The analysis looks beyond the fossil fuel and utility sector, by including energy-intensive sectors as well as indirect effects, and it differentiates between different types of investor.

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