EU Communities of Practice Meeting

4 October 2021

As part of the EU Energy Week we hosted a workshop for European policymakers, think tanks, NGOs and modellers to discuss the science-policy interface. Participants from the European Commission, Poland, Italy, Germany, North Macedonia, Netherlands, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, Russia, Switzerland and the UK attended. Publications on our findings will be published over the next year.

New Paper published in January 2021: “Systemic review of the outcomes and trade-offs of ten types of decarbonization policy instruments”

5 May 2021

New Paper published in January 2021: “Systemic review of the outcomes and trade-offs of ten types of decarbonization policy instruments” by Dr Cristina Peñasco, Prof Laura Díaz Anadón and Elena Verdolini in Nature Climate Change

The literature evaluating the technical and socioeconomic outcomes of policy instruments used to support the transition to low-carbon economies is neither easily accessible nor comparable and often provides conflicting results. This paper shows how the team have developed and implemented a framework to systematically review and synthesize the impact of ten types of decarbonization policy instruments on seven technical and socioeconomic outcomes. It shows that the selected types of regulatory and economic and financial instruments are generally associated with positive impacts on environmental, technological and innovation outcomes. Several instruments are often associated with short-term negative impacts on competitiveness and distributional outcomes. It is discussed how these trade-offs can be reduced or transformed into co-benefits by designing research and development and government procurement, deployment policies, carbon pricing and trading. They show how specific design features can promote competitiveness and reduce negative distributional impacts, particularly for small firms. An online interactive Decarbonisation Policy Evaluation Tool allows further analysis of the evidence.

Both the tool and the paper are the result of the INNOPATHS project (H2020 project of the EC).

You can see the paper here

New Paper Published by Aileen Lam and Jean-Francois Mercure: ‘Which policy mixes are best for decarbonising passenger cars?’

18 March 2021

Here Aileen summarises the paper:

“Using the FTT:Transport model of vehicle technology diffusion and market competition, we simulate the impact of climate policies on passenger car emissions in the US, UK, Japan, China and India up to 2050, seeking to understand policy interaction. We analyse six commonly seen policy instruments and explore the impact of combining each of these policies by developing 63 scenarios. Our results show that the diffusion dynamics of the system can lead to interaction of policy levers, generating synergies in some cases (combined effectiveness more than the sum of its parts), and mutual impediment effects in others (combined effectiveness less than the sum of its parts). In particular, we find that combining electric vehicle mandates with taxes and regulations on combustion vehicles is highly effective, as it simultaneously improves the availability of low-carbon options while penalising high carbon options.”