Fixing the Green Finance Gap: A system modelling approach

Seminar with Sarah Hafner
Wednesday, 27 Mar 2019

In the context of the Paris Agreement 2016 and the Climate Change Act 2008, the UK aims at decarbonising its energy supply sector. Current research shows that the ‘green’ transition of the UK energy supply sector, as described in the Carbon Plan (HM Government, 2011), requires a substantial amount of additional investments in energy infrastructure. While the ‘green finance gap’ is generally acknowledged in the field, policy recommendations on how to address the barriers towards more ‘green’ investments into renewable energy infrastructure are currently to a large extent missing.

In this seminar, CUSP/GSI researcher Sarah Hafner will be presenting some of the findings from her CUSP project, using empirically-calibrated system models to explore sustainable prosperity: Having built a new system dynamics ecological macroeconomic model, relaxing some of the major assumptions of neoclassical economics, she investigates the following two main research questions: (1) What policies contribute to scaling-up green finance into renewable energy infrastructure, and (2) what are their related socio-economic (e.g. inequality) and macro-economic (e.g. GDP) consequences?