Topic Climate Policy

Emissions Trading in Regulated Electricity Markets

Analyzing Climate and Energy Policy Integration: The Case of the Mexican Energy Transition

One of the main challenges faced by climate policy makers today is to design and implement policies capable of transferring climate policy goals into sectoral actions towards transformational pathways. Hence, climate policies need to be of cross-cutting character, lead to coherence with sectoral goals and reconcile diverging sectoral interests. Against this background, Mexico has undertaken significant ...

The Structure, Drivers and Policy Implications of the European Carbon Footprint

Policy to reduce the European Union’s (EU) carbon footprint needs to be grounded in an understanding of the structure and drivers of both the domestic and internationally traded components. Here we analyse consumption-based emission accounts (for the main greenhouse gases (GHGs)) for the EU, focusing on understanding sectoral contributions and what changes have been observed over the last two decades, ...

The Impact of Implementing a Consumption Charge on Carbon-Intensive Materials in Europe

The production of basic materials accounts for around 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Existing measures to reduce emissions from industry are limited due to a combination of competitiveness concerns and a lack of technological options available to producers. In this paper, we assess the possibility of implementing a materials charge to reduce demand for basic industrial products and, hence, ...

EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy – What Is Its Role on the Road towards Climate Neutrality?

The EU Taxonomy is the first standardised and comprehensive classification system for sustainable economic activities. It covers activities responsible for up to 80 percent of EU greenhouse gas emissions and may play an important role in channelling investments into low-carbon technologies by helping investors to make informed decisions. However, especially in transition sectors much depends on the ...

EU Taxonomy Increasing Transparency of Sustainable Investments

By developing a taxonomy for sustainable investments, the EU Commission has created the first standardized criteria for climate-friendly economic activities.To achieve the goal of climate neutrality by 2050, firms and investors must be well informed of which investments avoid greenhouse gas emis- sions and can thus be categorized as sustainable. The present report investigates to what extent the EU ...

Phasing Out Fossil Fuels: How to Achieve a Just Transition?

A Green COVID-19 Recovery of the EU Basic Materials Sector: Identifying Potentials, Barriers and Policy Solutions

This paper explores which climate-friendly projects could be part of the COVID-19 recovery while jump-starting the transition of the European basic materials industry. Findings from a literature review on technology options in advanced development stages for climate-friendly production and enhanced sorting and recycling of steel, cement, aluminium and plastics are combined with insights from interviews ...

Pipes, Taps and Vendors: An Integrated Water Management Approach

This paper applies a microeconomic-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. We assume a linear city, with some plausible assumptions on income and willingness-to-pay, and then calculate the optimal tap density, leading in turn to an optimal modal split ...

Comparing Coal Phase-Out Pathways: The United Kingdom’s and Germany’s Diverging Transitions

Political decisions and trends regarding coal use for electricity generation developed differently in the UK and Germany, despite being subject to relatively similar climate protection targets and general political and economic conditions. The UK agreed on a coal phase-out by 2024. In Germany, a law schedules a coal phase-out by 2038 at the latest. This paper investigates reasons for the different ...