Carlo Carraro, President Emeritus and Professor of Environmental Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, EIEE Executive Council

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The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are a series of annual meetings where world governments get together to achieve significant progress in limiting climate change and find solutions for the impacts of a warming climate. This year’s meeting, the COP26, hosted in Glasgow, just ended. The primary efforts of the COP26 summit were directed towards securing global net zero-emission by the middle of the century. How? Through, for example, the encouragement of investments in renewable energy or behavioral changes whereby individuals support the energy transition by switching to green energy or electric vehicles.

These are some of the topics that are part of the EIEE’s research agenda. One of the EIEE’s priority is to design transition pathways encompassing low carbon technologies such as renewables, hydrogen, storage, demand-side management. Another area of EIEE’s research deals with understanding how agents, physical and biophysical systems react to climate change. In EIEE, we also use field experiments to investigate key drivers of pro-environmental behavior. As a conclusion of the summit, negotiators agreed to “phase down” coal. Whether the Glasgow Climate Pact is a success or a failure will only be known some time down the road. Instead, what is clear is that to support the transition process, the research on these topics will remain essential. 

Cristina Cattaneo, EIEE Scientist

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We regret that we won’t be able to host the meeting in person. But we are trying to make things up by a great list of speakers and panelists.

Besides high representatives of the Italian government and European Commission – not to mention our founders – the event will include the legendary science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose latest book is an inspiration about humanity’s ability to cooperate in the face of the climate crisis. He will be joined by bright young voices and IPCC authors in a discussion about how to imagine a resilient and inclusive future.

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From the middle of the storm, we still lack the necessary distance to study this phenomenon thoroughly. Nonetheless, we can look into the past to search for significant changes in priorities and values brought about by pandemics (a great book to do this is Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden).

When you start thinking about it, the existential questions pandemic brings to the table are very similar to the questions climate change raises. They concern our willingness to trade off some of our welfare to protect society’s most vulnerable individual. They involve intergenerational welfare trade-offs. They question our relationship with Nature and speak to our connectedness as humans, across borders and income groups. Even in popular culture, disaster movies’ plots, but for the odd meteorite, develop around germs or whether extremes of some sort. The challenge is always the same: will the threat unite us, leading to success, or will we succumb to Nature’s will?

More than competing for prime time with climate change, the COVID pandemic may be the dress rehearsal that will help us figure out who we want to be.

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It is not possible to open a Spring 2020 newsletter without referring to the COVID health emergency affecting social and economic systems, up to our most consolidated habits, worldwide. Trying to defuse a bit the dramatic situation, we are proposing, from the priviledged position of our research activity that can be reasonably managed in remote, our pros and cons of working in COVID times. More seriously, EIEE is engaged in exploring the deep bidirectional connections between COVID-like emergencies and the climate crisis. Indeed not only climate action can bring health co-benefits, but it is also a high return investment, utmost needed in recovery times. With this awareness we wish you good reading!

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But we feel it is due, and actually twice. EIEE is a commitment and a partnership of two leading research institutions, Resources for the Future and Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici. These institutes excel in economic and climate research. As for every daughter or son, we hope it got the best of the two parents. We hope it will advance climate and sustainability economic research and help formulate science based environmental policy in Europe, US and the rest of the world. A twice thanks, then, to the founders who believed in us and to you for reading and helping us make this institution thrive.

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