Publications

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 […]

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 […]

The transformations in various sectors required for the energy transition pose major challenges to political, economic and civil society actors: business models need to be reoriented and new technologies developed or implemented. Sustainable decarbonisation, which requires the success of the energy transition, also requires high levels of public and private investment which is difficult in […]

A Perspective article, published by the Global Climate Forum in the journal Nature Climate Change, highlights that overcoming social conflicts associated to shared resources will be key in adapting to the impacts of climate change. The article shows that decades of research on the commons, resources belonging to or affecting entire communities and most well-known […]

The history of Europe is strongly and often dramatically interwoven with that of the Balkans. Presently, the nexus between Europe and the Balkans is acquiring new relevance due to sluggish growth and rising regional disparities across Europe, to diverging national interests exacerbated by the migrant crisis, and to the prospect of the Chinese “one belt, […]

GCF Report This study shows that an investment-oriented climate policy based on credible climate goals can overcome the increasingly threatening stagnation of the European economy. Since other strategies to tackle the crisis are noticeably losing their plausibility, a constructive debate on this issue is urgently needed.

New working paper in ESRB report Is the international financial system at risk, if policy and markets react too late and too abruptly to climate change? A report, published yesterday by the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) “Too late, too sudden: Transition to a low-carbon economy and systemic risk” tries to find answers to this […]

Climate and energy policy are faced with the challenge of having to deal with interrelated uncertainties. In risk research, such uncertainties are referred to as integrated risks. In this context, the concept of risk is neutral in value and includes both positive futures (known in technical jargon as upside risks) and negative futures (downside risks). […]