The 12th edition of Green Week, the biggest annual conference on European environment policy, will take place from 22 to 25 May 2012 in Brussels and will focus on "Water". FEEM will participate in a session on water pricing and will organize a side event focusing on the legal, administrative and economic challenges of ‘getting the price right’ in Italy.
On May 22-24, 2012, the AMPERE project on "Assessment of Climate Change Mitigation Pathways and Evaluation of the Robustness of Mitigation Cost Estimates", coordinated by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is organizing its first stakeholders’ meeting at FEEM premises in Venice. The meeting will discuss recent research outputs and findings on mitigation pathways and associated cost evaluations and will examine the latest contributions for the negotiations and the policy processes. The research consortium and the invited experts will also review the existing modeling assessments and highlight the main challenges in translating key results for other communities.
A key issue emerging within the energy-efficiency debate is how policy and programs may influence consumers’ perception and enable investments in energy efficiency. This article presents a candidate policy that provides up-front funds to residential property owners, allowing them to make energy-efficiency improvements to their buildings.
Understanding the effect of climate change on coral reef ecosystems requires a mapping exercise at global levels which considers main drivers such as the socio-economic and the environmental factors. On May 17, 2012, Marie Curie research fellow Sabah Abdullah presents at FEEM the latest results and findings from her research work on “Mapping Vulnerability and Exposure to Climate Change for Coral Reef Communities”.
Gérard Mondello, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, shows the difficulties of comparing the effectiveness of two among the most important liability regimes in tort law: rule of negligence and strict liability. Matching up liability regimes according to their capacity to provide the highest level of safety appears to be ineffective: in fact comparing their individual efficiency needs to call for other components, as detailed in the corresponding FEEM working paper.
Melanie Heugues, FEEM Marie Curie research fellow, presents a study focusing on the interaction between two important forms of international cooperation: the one on clean energy technologies and the one on global environmental externalities. Differently from the precedent literature, the role of the ability of one country to absorb spillovers from other countries (absortive capacity) and its dependence on R&D spending are here at the core of the analysis.
The recent economic crisis has brought to light the importance of opportunities that lie in the newly emerging markets (South). The article on "The globalisation of innovation: challenges and opportunities for Europe", published today on FEEM Review of Environment, Energy and Economics (Re3) by Alireza Naghavi and Maria Comune, introduces the notion of global innovation networks and presents policy options to be gained from the challenges presented by the internationalisation of innovation activities.
FEEM researchers analyse the effect of skilled migration on different measures of innovation in a panel of European countries from 1997 to 2007. They find that in addition to the positive contribution to knowledge formation in host countries, migrants might furthermore positively affect natives' productivity, as new ideas are likely to arise through the interaction of diverse cultures and diverse approaches in problem solving.
Between now and 2050, humanity must face a double problem: the growing scarcity of oil and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Solving this complicated riddle may appear an even harder task after the Fukushima disaster. This article focuses on a joint interdisciplinary research effort to solve this puzzle.
