While the first three flagships focus on specific sectors and technologies, this flagship aims at taking a comprehensive view by focusing on larger entities; nations, regions and the world. Development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies are driven by the long-term goal of becoming a low-emission society. The public good-characteristics of the environment and the climate call for coordinated and over-arching policies across sectors and/or nations. There is a need to understand the political, legal, economic, behavioural and technological motivations and obstacles for alternative pathways.
Approaches in this flagship embrace theoretical and numerical models of technological, behavioural and political responses to challenges in the energy-environment-climate nexus. It is also pivotal to learn from experience by using empirical methods and experiments of behavioural responses.
This Flagship focuses on three major themes
1. Greening the economy
- Transition of the economy from fossil-fuel based industries and petroleum dependency to green energy and clean activities
- National, regional and global scenarios of technological, economic and environmental development ( e.g. in the wake of Paris)
- The conflict between short-run abatement considerations and long-run transformation
- Time-inconsistency and commitment problems.
2. National and international climate policies and treaties
- Impacts on competitiveness, trade and carbon leakage of low-emission strategies
- Multilateral negotiations, agreements, coalitions/clubs and coordination of policies
- Impacts on global energy markets of demand and supply side policies.
3. Bariers and opportunities to transformation
- The interaction of multiple political goals and policy instruments
- Political and distributional aspects of transformation (lobbyism, inter-generational burden and inequality)
- Ethical, psychological and legal aspects of transformation – the impacts of alternative behavioural responses.