MCC and Leibniz Institute SAFE explore social impacts of climate policy in the transport sector
A project proposal has won the Leibniz Association's Collaborative Excellence competition and will receive funding for three years from 2023. Edenhofer: “Strategic partnership”.
Petrol station: carbon pricing makes fuel more expensive, decreasing the economic viability of emission-intensive used cars. | Photo: Shutterstock/zenspider
A new research collaboration, which has been identified as being particularly promising, is set to help make climate policy in the transport sector even more socially acceptable. The project, which the renowned Leibniz Association research network has now selected in its “Leibniz Collaborative Excellence” competition and will fund for three years from 2023, is called “Stranded assets, financial constraints, and the distributional impacts of climate policy”. The project partners are the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE in Frankfurt am Main and the Berlin-based climate research institute MCC (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change).
Stranded assets are, for example, emission-intensive used cars that are losing their economic viability due to the rise in carbon pricing and thus fuel prices. The new research collaboration now plans to scientifically explore the extent to which carbon pricing and other climate policy instruments strain different income groups. The MCC project leader is Nicolas Koch, head of the Policy Evaluation Lab. This research unit combines advanced methodologies for causal impact and welfare analysis with the power of big data and machine learning. Its aim is to provide evidence-based support for climate policy making.
The Leibniz Collaborative Excellence funding programme, in which MCC has now been included for the first time, promotes “projects that are particularly innovative, and which require collaborative networking in order to succeed”. According to the Leibniz Association, the new alliance of SAFE and MCC will “help to design distributional policies that better mitigate adverse effects for those affected and increase the social acceptance of the inevitable change”. Commenting on the Leibniz Association's decision, MCC Director Ottmar Edenhofer said. “We are grateful and delighted to have successfully won a competitive project in a highly relevant research field, and to have a new strategic partnership with a strong Leibniz Institute.”
Further information
Web presence of the Leibniz Collaborative Excellence funding programme:
https://www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/en/research/leibniz-competition/leibniz-collaborative-excellence
