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ABSTRACT:

The talk addresses two issues: a just effort sharing distribution across countries and a comparative evaluation of various pathway options within countries.

On the former, the European Commission has suggested a differentiated effort sharing allocation among countries, based primarily on a capability criterion. We show that additional consideration of the equally relevant principles of responsibility and equality does shift reduction targets, sometimes significantly so. Such further considerations might increase buy-in from countries which up to now may not have agreed with an approach emphasizing capability as the only relevant factor in carbon budget allocation (download paper, including an open access online tool).

For implementation within the countries of Europe, we develop socio-political derived net-zero energy pathways, implement them in a bottom-up energy model and evaluate them in an aggregate socio-economic model. For the Member States of the EU, UK and South Eastern European countries we find that a people-powered storyline dominates more centralized approaches in various dimensions, including overall welfare, but the extent to which this occurs differs across time and countries.


ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Karl W. Steininger is Professor of Climate Economics and Sustainable Transition at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz. He also serves as chair of the doctoral school at the Department of Economics, where he has been on the faculty since 1990. Prior to coming to Graz, he earned a Masters Degree from the University of Vienna, followed by a Fulbright grant for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Economics at the University of Vienna. He was on the faculty at the Technical University of Vienna and with the World Banks Environment Department in Washington, D.C.

Karls research focuses on economic impacts of climate change and long term low-carbon transition, analyzing options such as adjustments in spatial planning, technological development in industry or enhancing the supply of renewable energy, including solar. This involves the fields of environmental and resource economics, transport economics, spatial economics, international economics and public finance.
His more than 100 publications on climate change, global change and international economic issues were published in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Global Environmental Change, Environmental and Resource Economics and Ecological Economics, his books with Springer and Edward Elgar.

He heads Wegener Centers research group Economics of Climate and Environmental Change, is speaker of Uni Graz research on Climate and Global Change, President of the Austrian Economic Association (NOeG), Chair of the Monitoring Group of the Paris Agreement and Transport at the national transport norming body FSV, past chairman of the Board of the Climate Change Centre Austria, and past chair of the Chapter of Environmental and Resource Economics of the German Economic Association (Verein fuer Socialpolitik). He reviews for the world´s top journals in his field and advises multiple research funding organizations.

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