Why focusing on innovation? Elena Verdolini, CMCC researcher at SEME Division, tries to answer to this question at the CMCC Annual Meeting 2019 with a talk titled “Innovation for the low-carbon transition”.

“Innovation and technological change dynamics are relevant to understand climate change impacts and solutions on socio-economic systems”, Elena Verdolini explains. “They help identify mitigation options to reduce GHG emissions and, more generally, they allow us to understand what factors matter for knowledge generation and flow (e.g. policy inducement, cooperation, gender-related innovation dynamics, but also digitalization)”.

As explained by Elena Verdolini, another key aspect is that innovation affects the socio-economic system as a whole, influencing what is produced in each economy (and how it is produced), the type of skills and education required from the work-force, and the wage associated with different professions, the type of products traded between countries (and how carbon-intensive they are).
She also illustrated two of the commonly used methodologies to assess future technology costs, namely expert elicitations and learning curves approaches, as applied to low-carbon energy technologies (e.g.: solar and wind power, nuclear energy, biofuels etc).

“Innovation is therefore crucial”, Verdolini concluded, “and in the new forthcoming IPCC Assessment Report (AR6) an entire chapter will be dedicated to this topic”.

For further information, read the article:

Elena Verdolini, Laura Díaz Anadón, Erin Baker, Valentina Bosetti, Lara Aleluia Reis, Future Prospects for Energy Technologies: Insights from Expert Elicitations, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Volume 12, Issue 1, Winter 2018, Pages 133–153, https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rex028

Read also the news “Green technology and eco-efficient firms as an opportunity to promote financial de-risking”.

Watch the video “Working for IPCC AR6: Elena Verdolini” and read more on this topic here.