Publications

Klaus Lucas (Institute of Technical Thermodynamics), Ortwin Renn (Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies) and Carlo Jaeger (GCF) give a review of how insights form complexity science can be applied to the domain of systemic risks. They have identified four major properties of systemic risks: they are (1) transboundary in nature, (2) highly interconnected and intertwined […]

Ortwin Renn, Klaus Lucas, Armin Haas & Carlo C. Jaeger Things are different today: the challenge of global systemic risks Journal of Risk Research, DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2017.1409252 (2017)

Can societies adapt to 21stcentury sea-level rise? The ability of societies around the world to adapt to 21stcentury sea-level rise (SLR) is more likely to be dependent upon social factors, including finance, than technical capabilities. That is the conclusion of an international team of researchers lead by Dr. Jochen Hinkel from the Global Climate Forum […]

During the last years, many ICT-based tools have been developed for policy making. However, only few of them have been taken up either by policy-makers or other user groups. In order to better understand the success factors, we have conducted an extensive review of existing and successful tools such as America’s Army, MarketPlace, C-ROADS, World […]

Large scale investment in coastal protection is cost-efficient for 90 percent of today’s global floodplain population. This is the result of a global scale cost-benefit analysis of large-scale coastal protection performed by researchers from Global Climate Forum and published in the journal Global Environmental Change. “Sea-level rise is occurring in many areas of the world […]

To achieve the desired decarbonisation of the German economy, a stronger integration of the electricity, heat and transport sectors is needed. Digitalisation can play a key role in this process, e.g. in the fields of energy efficiency and the integration of renewables. The legal framework for the digitalization of the energy transition, is currently being […]

To achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments. The question of climate change mitigation is often related to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]