Projects

About research projects I am involved in

Green growth and win-win strategies for sustainable climate action (GREENWIN)

The GREEN-WIN project is a major international transdisciplinary research collaboration funded under the H2020 framework programme. It aims at increasing the understanding of links between climate action and sustainability and overcoming implementation barriers through win-win strategies. The project will critically assess where and under which conditions win-win and in particular green growth strategies work in practice and where fundamental trade-offs must be faced.

In this context, I am mainly involved in the modeling of technological diffusion and the impact of financial constraints on the development of green-growth strategies.

There are post-doc positions opened in this project. Contact me if you are interested.

Distributed Global Financial Systems for Society (DOLFINS)

DOLFINS is a H2020 funded project that addresses the global challenge of making the financial system better serve society. It does so by placing scientific evidence and citizens’ participation at the centre of the policy process in finance. The project strives to give scientific evidence and citizens’ participation central roles in the policy process concerning finance. DOLFINS will focus on two crucial and interconnected policy areas that will shape the public debate in the coming 5 years: How to achieve financial stability and how to facilitate the long-term investments required by the transition to a more sustainable, more innovative, less unequal and greener EU economy.

There are post-doc positions opened in this project. Contact me if you are interested.

Simulation and Policy Modeling (SIMPOL)

SIMPOL is an FP7 funded project coordinated by Stefano Battiston at the university of Zürich. I am the scientific leader of the project at Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.

The project proceeds from the vision that fundamental advances of policy modeling in finance and climate finance can only stem from a genuinely interdisciplinary approach where network science, big data and ICT’s meet economics and financial regulation. Accordingly, on the one hand we will develop new methods to assess the systemic importance of market players in (climate) financial networks and we will evaluate the effect of regulations in close collaborations with representatives of various regulatory bodies. The results will contribute to the discussion on how financial innovations could ignite a transition towards a greener economy and a more sustainable financial system. On the other hand, we will leverage on open data initiatives and semantic web to empower citizens with a more active role in relation to EU policies, by crowd-sourcing the mapping of the networks of influence involved in the policy making process.

More information can be found on the project website here.

IMPRESSIONS

IMPRESSIONS is an integrated proposal funded under the FP7 and coordinated by Paula Harrison at the University of Oxford. I am the scientific leader of the project at the Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.

IMPRESSIONS will provide empirically-grounded, transformative science that quantifies and explains the consequences of high-end climate scenarios for both decision-makers and society. IMPRESSIONS will develop and apply a novel participatory methodology that explicitly deals with uncertainties and strong non-linear changes focussing on high-end climate change, but also including intermediate warming levels. This new methodology will build on the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) and shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) to create a coherent set of high-end climate and socio-economic scenarios covering multiple scales. These scenarios will be applied to a range of impact, adaptation and vulnerability models that build on theories of complex systems and address tipping elements as key characteristics of such systems. The models will be embedded within an innovative multi-scale integrated assessment approach to improve analysis of cross-scale interactions and cross-sectoral benefits, conflicts and trade-offs. Model results will inform the development of time- and path-dependent transition pathways. These will include mechanisms to foster synergies between adaptation and mitigation and will aim to build resilience in the face of uncertainty. Methods will be applied within five linked multi-sectoral case studies at global, European and regional/local scales. Stakeholders within these case studies will be fully engaged in the research process through a series of in-depth professionally facilitated workshops which maximise their active participation in defining high-end scenarios and adaptation and mitigation pathways, and in analysing the inherent risks and opportunities of new policy strategies. This will build the capacity of stakeholders to understand the risks, opportunities, costs and benefits associated with different adaptation and mitigation pathways under high-end scenarios, and how they might be effectively embedded within decision-making processes.

There will be post-doc positions in agent-based modeling available. Contact me if you are interested.

Analytical aspects of real-financial linkages in models with heterogenous interacting agents. 2012/2014.

This is a joint project with Mauro Gallegati, Simone Landini and Herbert Gintis funded by the Institute For New Economic Thinking.

The Great Depression of the 1930's and the business cycle in the years following WWII suggested that the main problem of economic stabilization was the regulation of aggregate demand. That is what equilibrium economic models were designed for. In the 1990's, there began a series of new instabilities in the international economy, based not on investment fluctuations, but rather financial bubbles and domino-like collapses of the financial sectors of various countries. These instabilities culminated in the recent global financial crisis. This project aims to build a new generation of models fit to analyze and manage these new governance challenges. These models will be helpful tools for the governance of globalized and interconnected economies

Global System Dynamics and Policy, 2010/2013.

GSDP was an FP7 coordination and support action that developed a research program for the study of global systems in an ongoing dialogue with decision makers. I have lead the workpackage on "Global economic interactions and sustainability." GSDP has consolidated an international community of researchers engaged in dialogues with decision-makers, and generated a variety of research and consultancy projects in Europe and elsewhere. See the project website for more information.

A new growth path for Europe, 2010/2011.

This is a joint project involving researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Oxford University, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne , Technical University of Athens, and the Global Climate Forum. It was commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

The study was undertaken in view of the decision whether Europe will increase its CO2 reduction target for 2020 from 20% to 30% compared to 1990 levels. This decision will be taken in 2011 or early 2012. The study claims that a 30% reduction can help boost European investments that open the way to a new growth path with less emissions, more employment and higher economic growth.