Topic Climate Policy

Certification against Greenwashing in Nascent Bond Markets: Lessons from African ESG Bonds

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. Climate and sustainability-linked bonds can provide funding to African governments and corporations for projects that help to mitigate climate change, combat biodiversity loss, and foster sustainable development. However, less than 0.3% of the global environmental, social, governance (ESG) bond issuance volume is devoted to projects ...

Realizing the Value of Recycling – Assessing the Elements of a Policy Package

We investigate policies for increasing recycling to facilitate decarbonization within the basic material sector, including market-based policies, such as carbon pricing, advanced disposal fee and minimum recycled content requirement, and non-market policies, such as product design standard. We develop an analytical model to assess the role of these policy instruments for recycling related choices of ...

Measuring Total Carbon Pricing

While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing-such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms-remain important factors affecting the mitigation incentives in an economy. Taken together, how can policy makers think about the overall price signal for carbon emissions and the incentive it ...

Exploring the Interdependence of Climate, Finance, Energy, and Geopolitics: A Conceptual Framework for Systemic Risks Amidst Multiple Crises

Navigating the transition toward a zero-emission and just future amidst multiple crises requires a nuanced understanding of potential hindrances to investments and energy transitions. As current approaches hardly consider the big picture of interacting crises, this study offers a framework to analyze the dynamics and risk channels between 1) the climate crisis, 2) financial (in)stability, 3) the geopolitical ...

Heat Transition: Municipalities Need Federal Support in Decommissioning Natural Gas Networks

Large parts of the existing natural gas distribution networks must be decommissioned due to the decarbonization of the heat supply. However, there are neither regulatory nor economic incentives for the gas network operators to do so and delaying the decommissioning could be expensive for the remaining customers. This Weekly Report analyzes to what extent municipalities can partially decommission the ...

Questioning Nuclear Scale-up Propositions: Availability and Economic Prospects of Light Water, Small Modular and Advanced Reactor Technologies

This paper addresses the pressing need for rapid decarbonization of energy systems by examining the role of nuclear power in future energy scenarios collected in the IPCC database. Despite their explorative character, energy scenarios can influence decision-makers or might be used to promote certain technology developments. They are increasingly subject to the integration into real-world settings and ...

Avoid, Shift or Improve Passenger Transport? Impacts on the Energy System

New Trade Models, Same Old Emissions?

This paper investigates the elusive role of productivity heterogeneity in new trade models in the trade and environment nexus. We contrast the Eaton-Kortum and the Melitz models with firm heterogeneity to the Armington and Krugman models without heterogeneity. We show that if firms have a constant emission share in terms of sales — as they do in a wide range of trade and environment models — the three ...

Revisiting Investment Costs for Green Steel: Capital Expenditures, Firm Level Impacts, and Policy Implications

The transition of the steel sector to carbon neutrality requires significant investment. In this study, we aim to better understand the scale of investment required for a transition to hydrogen-based steelmaking and the ability of listed steelmakers to finance this investment. First, we analyze how capital expenditures are estimated in the academic literature and compare them with reported investment ...

Ampel-Monitor Energiewende: ambitionierte Ziele, aber zu geringe Dynamik

The German “traffic light” (Ampel) coalition has set ambitious new energy transition targets. Using an open data tool developed at DIW Berlin, we discuss the progress and challenges of selected indicators. Since the government took over, photovoltaic capacity increased by 45 % to 87 GW by April 2024, with a planned doubling by 2030. However, onshore wind power grew by only 11 % to 62 GW. The installation ...