Climate change is a phenomenon beset with major uncertainties and researchers should include them in Integrated Assessment Models. However, including further dimensions in IAM models comes at a cost. In particular, it makes most of these models suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this...

China’s unbundling reform in 2002 aimed to introduce competitiveness into the power industry, especially the generation sector, to improve its operational efficiency. Meanwhile, great concern about a range of environmental problems and global climate change increasingly calls for saving energy...

Goal-oriented transformative change processes - that is, system-transforming processes that are guided by the ambition to resolve current or expected future societal challenges of various kinds - can only start once possible goals are considered by key stakeholders and the relevant actors are...

The existence of an environmental limit in the Solow-Swan economy changes the nature of economic growth, but does not preclude it. When atmospheric greenhouse gases reach a predetermined absolute threshold, further growth requires a permanently expanding, resource-intensive mitigation effort. If...

This paper investigates the link between development, economic growth, and the economic losses from natural disasters in a normative analytical framework, with an illustration on hurricane flood risks in New Orleans. It concludes that, where capital accumulates through increased density of...

Technology transfer is one of the most contentious issues in international negotiations on climate change. Despite its recognition at international platforms such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, G20, etc., the independent review of Climate Technology Centre and...

This policy brief argues in favor of a new urban model that harnesses the power that cities have to curb global warming. Such a model tackles fundamental management challenges in the energy, building and transport sectors to promote the growth of diverse and compact cities. Such a model is...

With CAIT WRI data for those countries which submitted quantifiable CO2 emission caps under the Copenhagen Agreement, this note supports the existence of a long run relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP in 11 of the 26 countries in our sample over the period 1980-2008. However, the...

The study analyzed the growth of agricultural activity in the Amazon region and the consequent increase in deforestation. In addition, it was investigated whether the difference in land productivity observed in agriculture in the region of the Legal Amazon can be justified by low efficiency and,...

The need for monitoring countries’ overall performance in sustainable development (SD) is widely recognized, but the methods for aggregating vast amounts of empirical data remain rather crude. This paper examines the so-called ‘benefit of doubt’ weighting method as a tool for identifying...