Given the urgency of the climate crisis and other societal challenges, calls for businesses to engage with those challenges have grown substantially over recent years. But which topics should businesses prioritize? Until now these have been limited to issues that can be easily measured and reported and that pose an immediate risk to the company. This research project will use a novel dataset which includes the ‘objectified’ societal footprint of companies (including the impact they have on society). It will allow to make a significant step towards a holistic link between financial and societal value creation in firms. 

• dr. Timo van Balen

Achieving societal missions requires radical innovations by entrepreneurs. The ESMEE project seeks to understand and improve regional ecosystems for sustainable entrepreneurship with a data-and-dialogue driven ecosystem approach. We do this with scientific analysis of the mechanisms of ecosystem development, and how sustainable entrepreneurship contributes to societal missions, as well scientifically validated diagnosis and evaluation of ecosystem development co-designed and co-created with Regional Development Agencies.

• dr. Maria Greve
• dr. ir. Matthijs Janssen
• dr. Janpieter van der Pol
• dr. Frank van Rijnsoever
• prof. dr. Erik Stam
• Stefan Kwant

Recent literature has underlined the interplay among climate mitigation, adaptation, and finance, as well as between climate action and other development agendas, including sustainable resource use, human development and equity, and environmental pressures. Such an interconnected policy environment requires an integrated ecosystem of disciplines, methods, and tools. Despite the significant evolution of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in the last decade, there remain several criticisms on their design, use, and adequacy to respond to unaddressed and emerging questions in the light of the Paris Agreement and net zero ambition. These include openness, legitimacy, and ownership, as well as technical feasibility to represent demand-side and broader societal transformations, cross-sectoral interactions, physical impacts and adaptation, climate finance and labour dynamics, and other sustainability goals.
 
DIAMOND will update, upgrade, and fully open six IAMs that are emblematic in scientific and policy processes, improving their sectoral and technological detail, spatiotemporal resolution, and geographic granularity. It will further enhance modelling capacity to assess the feasibility and desirability of Paris-compliant mitigation pathways, their interplay with adaptation, circular economy, and other SDGs, their distributional and equity effects, and their resilience to extremes, as well as robust risk management and investment strategies. This will be done via integration of tools and insights from psychology, finance research, behavioural and labour economics, operational research, and physical science. We will develop a transdisciplinary scientific approach to legitimise the implementation process and co-create research questions that stretch the frontiers of climate science, as well as establish vibrant communities of practice to transparently open model enhancements and to develop capacities, thereby lowering the entrance barriers to the established IAM community.

• Alexandra Serebriakova BSc

In order to uncouple economic development from resource use, climate change and loss of biodiversity, innovative solutions need to be developed. Recent academic and practical efforts have demonstrated that a sustainability transition achieving this goal is technically and economically feasible. Nevertheless, corresponding investments remain niches. This is puzzling because the efficient market hypothesis assuming perfect information in financial markets predicts that investment opportunities and risks are evaluated properly. However, information about the prospects and risks associated with them diffuses very slowly across different financial market players that are financing them from commercialisation to large-scale market introduction. Building on an alternative, adaptive market hypothesis, that is the fact that investors and lenders’ perceptions are playing an important role in their decision making, this doctoral thesis will focus on three mechanisms aiming at scaling up sustainable finance solutions from niche- to mainstream actors.

• prof. dr. Kees Koedijk
• dr. Helen Toxopeus
• Catalina Papari

• Alessandro Diego Scopelliti
• Hans Degryse

Urban environments are accelerating their transformation towards cleaner, friendlier places able to respect and use resources more efficiently. Across Europe, cities are blending social innovation, engineering and ICT excellence and smart technologies to help reach these goals. IRIS is at the forefront of this change and announce itself as the newest addition to the European Commission Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) lighthouse projects. The project has been developed around three lighthouse cities - Utrecht (The Netherlands, coordinator), Nice (France), and Gothenburg (Sweden) - who will work as collaborators and test-beds for follower cities Vaasa (Finland), Alexandroupolis (Greece), Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Spain) and Focsani (Romania). Each city will draw upon a mix of universities and research organisations, local authorities, innovation agencies and private expertise to accelerate entire communities to adopt ambitious energy, mobility and ICT initiatives.

In this project, Utrecht School of Economics (U.S.E) is responsible for organizing and evaluating a business incubation program in cooperation with UtrechtInc which can be replicated in the two other Lighthouse cities Nice and Gothenburg.

• Chris Eveleens MSc
• dr. ir. Ioannis Lampropoulos
• prof. dr. Wilfried van Sark
• dr. Joost Vervoort
• Jip Leendertse MSc

The EU has long had decarbonisation ambitions, but there remains considerable uncertainty as to precisely how these ambitions will be achieved, or what the impacts of such achievement will be on the EU economy and society more generally. INNOPATHS will resolve this uncertainty to the extent possible, will characterise and provide a quantification of the uncertainty which remains, and will describe in great detail a number of possible low-carbon pathways for the EU, together with the economic, social and environmental impacts to which they are likely to lead. Therefore INNOPATHS develops an understanding the challenges of decarbonisation and the (technological) innovation needed to address them, present a detailed assessment of low-carbon technologies, their uncertainties, future prospects and system characteristics. Finally INNOPATHS researchers propose policy and innovation system reforms that will help the EU and Member States meet their greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

Based innovation financing literature and sector-specific modelling, the contribution of Friedemann (SFL/U.S.E.), ETH Zurich and PIK lies in the quantification of past and current investment flows to both incumbent high-carbon technologies as well as new low-carbon alternatives as well as funding sources. In addition potential finance gaps unaccounted for in existing pathways are identified by translating technology-specific investment/divestment demands into likely demands for different kind of finance. As a central piece, public-private sector risk-sharing as means to facilitate private sector finance and address demand-supply mismatches will be studied and finally instruments and conditions through which the financial sector could play an enabling role in the transition towards a low-carbon economy will be derived.

• University College London (UCL)
• Euromediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC)
• Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
• E3Modelling (E3M)
• Aalto University
• Warsaw University of Technology
• Sciences Po
• Science Policy Research (SPRU) University of Sussex (SPRU)
• European University Institute
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
• Allianz Climate Solutions
• ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability)
• Nice and Serious

Nature-Based Solutions have the potential to limit impacts of climate change, enhance biodiversity and improve environmental quality while contributing to economic activities and social well-being. Examples are green roofs and city parks that limit heat stress, city lagoons that store water and permeable surfaces, vegetation and rain gardens to intercept storm water. To unlock the potential of nature based solutions for sustainable urban development, NATURVATION takes a transdisciplinary, internationally comparative approach to capture the multiple impacts and values of these solutions. Based on a comparison of 1000 nature based solutions across 6 cities, it identifies the most promising governance, business, finance and participation models and how to overcome the systemic conditions that currently limit their use. The real-world impact of NATURVATION is realized through co-design, co-development and co-implementation of new partnerships, knowledge, processes and tools required to build capacity, enable replication and foster cultural change.

Based on theories of institutional and societal transformations, valuation methods from environmental economics and financing of sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship, the U.S.E. researchers identify economically efficient innovations and viable business and financing models for nature based solutions. Moreover, they contribute to improving the economic components of a framework that will be developed for assessing nature based solutions for strategic planning of cities. Best practice business and finance models will be analyzed to derive structural conditions for finance.

• prof. dr. ir. Rob Raven
• prof. dr. Wouter Botzen
• prof. dr. Hens Runhaar
• dr. Helen Toxopeus
• Marija Bockarjova

• Durham University
• Central European University
• Ecologic Institute gGmbH
• ICLEI
• Institut Fur Landeskunde
• PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
• Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
• Lund University
• ENT Environment and Management
• The Centre for Economic and Regional Studies
• Malmo City
• Newcastle City Council
• Gemeente Utrecht