Der schnelle Anstieg der Zinsen in Kombination mit den stark gestiegenen Baukosten hat nicht nur den Wohnungsbau in Deutschland ausgebremst, sondern auch die Zielkonflikte zwischen erschwinglichem Wohnen und Klimaschutz offengelegt. Höhere energetische Standards steigern die Erstellungskosten...

Cities are made of people, by people and for people. Sustainable measures will have to make sense to inhabitants of cities, making their life more liveable. Furthermore, it is people who drive sustainability and who are its ultimate source and beneficiaries. This vision underpins the notion of...

In the absence of a global carbon price, many individual countries set up policies to incentivize specific abatement interventions. In turn, minimizing compliance cost requires policy-makers to identify interventions that are worth pursuing. With this in mind, the objective of this paper is to...

Carbon taxes are commonly seen as a rational policy response to climate change, but little is known about their performance from an ex-post perspective. This paper analyzes the emissions and cost impacts of the UK CPS, a carbon tax levied on all fossil-fired power plants. To overcome the problem...

Germany is struggling to meet its 2020 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and climate goals. Against this background, we analyze the current draft National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) that sets out how Germany aims to achieve its national and European climate goals by 2030. We introduce the...

This volume was prepared by Rahel Aichele while she was working at the ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. The chapters investigate how, in a...

China has realized that for its own sake and from the international community’s perspective, it cannot afford to continue along the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. Accordingly, the country has placed ecological goals at the same level of...

As the first global carbon fund, the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) aims to catalyze the market for project-based greenhouse gas emission reductions while promoting sustainable development and offering a learning-by-doing opportunity to its stakeholders. Since the inception in 2000,...

To decarbonize the power sector policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, time-inconsistent policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...

The European Union has been prizing itself for being the global leader in terms of climate change; its triptych approach and the 20-20-20 targets were certainly an enviable effort prior to the United Nations Convention. However, with the economic crisis having left its mark, there has been a...