Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Christian Flachsland

Wednesday, May 18, 2022, at 12.30 - 13.30
RZ F 21 or Online, Zoom | Sign up here

Assessing Climate Policy Instrument Mix Pathways: An application to the German light duty vehicle sector.

Enlarged view: Colloquium: Christian Flachsland

We introduce and test a novel qualitative design and assessment framework for climate policy mix pathways and use it to construct and assess alternative policy pathways offering increased ambition of GHG abatement in Germany’s light duty vehicle (LDV) sector. The main novelty of the approach is a strong focus on temporality, starting from the observation that net zero GHG transitions undergo different stages with different challenges, and therefore different policy approaches are needed as the transitions in different sectors mature. We identify key intertemporal challenges for LDV transitions that policy mix pathways need to address. We use our approach to compare the stringency of policy instruments over time across different future policy pathways, first reconstructing the status quo policy pathway in Germany, including the EU commissions’ ‘Fit For 55’ proposals. We then propose and qualitatively assess three alternate policy mix pathways which promise to enable the achievement of 2030 German GHG and BEV targets. Each of the alternate pathways carries different risks in terms of LDV transition challenges. We hope our approach can succeed in integrating insights from different academic disciplines (e.g. engineering, economics, political science) and bridging different communities (e.g. academia, applied policy analysts, policymakers), and help stimulate similar analyses in other sectors and regions.

About Prof. Dr. Christian Flachsland

Christian Flachsland is Professor of Sustainability at the Hertie School and Director of the School's Centre for Sustainability. He is also a Research Fellow at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), where he previously led the working group ‘Governance’. His research focuses on the design, governance and politics of climate, energy and sustainability policy. He publishes in Science, Nature Climate Change, and leading journals on climate policy and climate politics. He co-coordinates the research on Governance in the Kopernikus-Ariadne project, a major research consortium assessing climate policy options for Germany and Europe, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The presentation of the talk is available for protected page download.

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