project website: www.green-win-project.eu

GREEN-WIN

Green growth and win-win strategies for sustainable climate action

Project summary
Green growth is an emergent concept that promises to address climate and sustainability concerns while fostering economic prosperity and social justice. A growing literature shows that green growth is indeed possible and international organizations such as the OECD, the Word Bank and UNEP have adopted green growth as a key concept for implementing sustainable development strategies. But how does this work in practice? In which domains of climate action may green growth live up to its promises? And, when green growth is not possible, what fundamental trade-offs are involved? How can we switch economies to green growth pathways and what kind of policy instruments are needed for this? The project GREEN-WIN aims at providing answers to these questions. It will assess the practical feasibility of implementing green growth strategies to meet mitigation, adaptation and sustainability goals.

Objectives

  • To advance the scientific understanding of the synergies and trade-offs between mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development with a particular emphasis on developing and critically assessing the feasibility of win-win and green growth strategies that meet climate goals as well as the broader sustainable development agenda.
  • To assess costs and benefits, as well as risks and opportunities of actual and potential climate and sustainability-related policies, and their cross-scale, cross-policy and cross-domain interactions.
  • To accelerate the adoption and transfer of low-carbon and adaptation technologies and support green growth projects within the G20 countries, with a particular emphasis on fostering green entrepreneurs, scaling up funding and international investment.
  • To develop a sustained global dialogue and communities of practice that promote practical learning beyond the project partners on low-carbon and adaptation technologies, sustainable climate policies and green growth.
  • To contribute to major international scientific assessments, the knowledge-sharing goals of the UNFCCC and the EU strategy for international research and innovation by strengthening the evidence-base for win-win policies and green growth climate actions.

Background

This project addresses the European Commissions Call for Proposal: ‘Linkages between climate change actions and sustainable development’

Start date: 1.6.2015
Project duration: 40 Months
Project volume: about 4 million Euro

Concept & Approach

  • Overcoming implementation barriers through win-win and green growth strategies: Climate action, both in the area of mitigation and adaptation, is often constrained by conflicting goals and interests of the involved public and private actors at multiple levels of decision-making. This proposal focuses on overcoming these barriers by developing, transferring and upscaling win-win strategies that reconcile conflicting interests and multiple goals including sustainable development goals.
  • At national to global levels we focus on win-win opportunities by integrating policies across domains and developing macro-economic green growth pathways through advancing economic models by incorporating the feedback of policy on technological innovation and identifying key leverage points for technological diffusion as well as accounting for the complex interactions between agents involved in planning under long term horizons.
  • At local to regional levels, the project will focus on a set of contexts where both urgent climate action is needed and the potential for effective mitigation, adaptation and upscaling of action is high. These are coastal flood risk management, urban energy efficiency and energy poverty and climate-resilient livelihoods.
  • Encouraging private investments: An emphasis will be placed on developing sustainable business models and creating green investment opportunities for the private sector with a focus on SMEs and medium sized projects. We initiate and facilitate an open and sustained dialogue between Europe and international research institutes, business and public actors. Outreach and dissemination will be carried out via social media and an open exchange of research results.

Project partner

Participant No

Participant organisation name

Short name

Country

1 (Coordinator)

Global Climate Forum

GCF

Germany

2

The Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona

UAB

Spain

3

E3-Modelling

E3M

Greece

4

Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University

UOXF

UK

5

Ecole d’Economie de Paris

EEP-PSE

France

6

University College London

UCL

UK

7

The Ground_Up Project

Ground_Up

Switzerland

8

Deltares

Deltares

The Netherlands

9

Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies

IASS

Germany

10

Global Green Growth Institute

GGGI

UK

11

Jill Jaeger

Jaeger

Austria

12

European Centre for Living Technology at Università Ca’Foscari di Venezia

UNIVE

Italy

13

Institute of Environmental Sciences at Boğaziçi University

IES

Turkey

14

Center for Remote Sensing and Ocean Sciences, Udayana University

UNUD

Indonesia

15

University of Cape Town

UCT

South Africa

16

2° Investing Initiative

2D

France

Findings

Ameli, N., Drummond, P., Bisaro, A. et al. Climate finance and disclosure for institutional investors: why transparency is not enough. Climatic Change (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02542-2

Bisaro, A. (2019). Coastal adaptation through urban land reclamation: Exploring the distributional effects. DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, 150(3), 131-144. https://doi.org/10.12854/erde-2019-453

Bisaro, A., Hinkel, J. Governance of social dilemmas in climate change adaptation. Nature Clim Change 6, 354–359 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2936

Bisaro, A., de Bel, M., Hinkel, J. et al. Leveraging public adaptation finance through urban land reclamation: cases from Germany, the Netherlands and the Maldives. Climatic Change (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02507-5

Bisaro, A, Hinkel, J. Mobilizing private finance for coastal adaptation: A literature review. WIREs Clim Change. 2018; 9:e514. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.514

Omann, I., Kammerlander, M., Jäger, J. et al. Assessing opportunities for scaling out, up and deep of win-win solutions for a sustainable world.Climatic Change (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02503-9