EU Climate and Energy Policies and Eco-Innovation Dynamics

Over the past three decades, the scientific community spent resources and efforts to better understand the challenging goal to mitigate carbon emissions mainly responsible for climate change and global warming. European Union has adopted stringent environmental policies oriented toward a rapid and substantial decarbonisation process of the energy system. The most recent version of the European Union decarbonisation strategy (briefly called Low Carbon Europe, Roadmap to 2050) includes stringent mitigation targets that might negatively impact economic competitiveness of energy-intensive industries.

To quantify potential benefits and costs arising from the decarbonisation strategy, the EU has invested huge resources in research activities aiming at assessing the economic impacts of mitigation policies from one side and economic losses due to climatic damage from the other side. Research programme frameworks as FP7 and H2020 have several research lines explicitly devoted to create and sustain multidisciplinary research groups based in different European countries to compare results obtained by different evaluation tools and to combine them into integrated assessment models.
In this context, the Rossi-Doria Centre is involved in well-established research networks and it intends developing its research interests in three main fields of analysis. First, an economic evaluation of potential benefits and costs of unilateral EU climate policies and/or multilateral environmental agreements will be carried. Second, the Centre will analyse the economic impacts associated with different degrees of uncertainty in climatic damage assessment in view of optimizing financial resources in adaptation and mitigation actions. Third, research activities will focus on dynamic technological patterns in eco-innovation activities as a major channel of achieving the long-term decarbonisation of the EU economy.
In particular, research at the Centre focuses on:
a) Development of complex modelling tools based on a dynamic CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) approach to analyse alternative policy mixes within the long-term low carbon EU strategy;
b) Modelling design of specific modules for the economic assessment of climatic damage and its impact on long-term growth perspectives;
c) Dynamic analysis of alternative combinations of mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize the economic losses and maximize the effectiveness of climate policies;
d) Impact assessment of alternative technological trajectories linked to green energy technologies, as energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.