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Does Green Public Procurement Trigger Environmental Innovations?

Green public procurement has gained high political priority and is argued to be an effective demand-side policy to trigger environmental innovations. However, the empirical evidence on its innovation impact is limited. We construct a novel firm-level dataset to investigate the effect of winning public procurement tenders with additional environmental award criteria on firms’ introduction of environmental ...

Water Resources in Germany: Increasingly Polluted and Regionally Overused

The effects of the climate crisis are worsening water shortages, not only in the Global South but also in Europe, for example in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Due to inadequate pricing of surface and groundwater abstraction and a lack of regulatory instruments, water overuse is occurring in some regions of Germany. Overuse is especially an issue for industry, which has contractually secured high volumes ...

Exploring Emerging Norms of Climate Neutrality: Implications for International Climate Cooperation and Finance

Policy Evaluation of Waste Pricing Programs Using Heterogeneous Causal Effect Estimation

Using machine learning methods in a quasi-experimental setting, I study the heterogeneous effects of introducing waste prices - unit prices on household unsorted waste disposal - on waste demands and municipal costs. Using a unique panel of Italian municipalities with large variation in prices and observables, I show that waste demands are nonlinear. I find evidence of constant elasticities at low ...

Impacts of Power Sector Model Features on Optimal Capacity Expansion: A Comparative Study

The transition towards decarbonized energy systems requires the expansion of renewable and flexibility technologies in power sectors. Many powerful tools exist to find optimal capacity expansion. In a stylized comparison of six models, we evaluate the capacity expansion results of basic power sector technologies. The technologies under investigation include base- and peak load power plants, electricity ...

The Implication of the Paris Targets for the Middle East through Different Cooperation Options

The core of the 36th round of the Energy Modeling Forum project shows that it is more likely that major fossil-fuel exporters, such as the Middle East, are highly affected because of the decrease in fossil-fuel extractions required for the worldwide fulfillment of the Paris agreement. We employ a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model of global trade and energy to examine the ...

How Can Solar Geoengineering and Mitigation Be Combined under Climate Targets?

So far, scientific analyses have mainly focused on the pros and cons of solar geoengineering or solar radiation management (SRM) as a climate policy option in mere isolation. Here, we put SRM into the context of mitigation by a strictly temperature-target-based approach. As the main innovation, we present a scheme that extends the applicability regime of temperature targets from mitigation-only to ...

A Scheme for Jointly Trading off Costs and Risks of Solar Radiation Management and Mitigation under Long-Tailed Climate Sensitivity Probability Density Distributions

Side effects of “solar-radiation management” (SRM) might be perceived as an important metric when society decides on implementing SRM as a climate policy option to alleviate anthropogenic global warming. We generalize cost-risk analysis that originally trades off expected welfare loss from climate policy costs and risks from transgressing climate targets to also include risks from applying SRM. In ...

Bridges over Troubled Waters: Climate Clubs, Alliances, and Partnerships as Safeguards for Effective International Cooperation?

Carbon Leakage, Consumption, and Trade

We review the state of knowledge concerning international CO2 emission transfers associated particularly with trade in energy-intensive goods and concerns about carbon leakage arising from climate policies. The historical increase in aggregate emission transfers from developing to developed countries peaked around 2006 and declined since. Studies find no evidence that climate policies lead to carbon ...