ISTP News

With the aim to evaluate the application of virtual environments (VEs) in lighting planning and policy making, ISTP PhD Students Michael Walczak and David Kretzer recently published in the Athens Journal of Architecture. They conclude that the dynamic VE technology appears to be a promising decision-making tool for illustrating potential planning and design shortcomings to policy stakeholders.

COVID-19 has already challenged many countries, causing concern about what will happen in African countries. To understand how the urban poor mitigate their risk of infection, ISTP PhD student Antoinette van der Merwe together with researchers from the University of Ghana and the University of Pretoria conducted a survey with 1,400 poor households in Accra and Johannesburg. They concluded that a costly shutdown of public life is only effective with a well-informed population.

Whether voluntary environmental action pays off for both business and the environment has been a subject of academic and policy debate for many decades. A recent study by CIS & ISTP PhD Student Dennis Kolcava, ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer, and NMBU & UZH Prof. Joachim Scholderer reveals that citizens are more willing to reward firms with public procurement contracts, tax breaks and lenient regulatory enforcement when these firms engage in ambitious voluntary environmental action.

The legal mechanism that people have been counting on to stop climate change has been politically unpopular for years. Amazingly, climate policy experts are now becoming confident that we can end CO2 emissions. An insightful study by the ISTP member Prof. Anthony Patt advocates that there are policy instruments that do fit climate change and are politically feasible. It suggests a roadmap for solving climate change that focuses first on supporting new technologies, and then on bringing down emissions.

In 2015 the global community agreed on a set of Sustainable Development Goals to put our planet on an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable trajectory. While the SDGs are an impressive testament to international cooperation, they were not accompanied by a clear plan of how to finance them. A recent study by ETH researchers focuses on multilateral development banks (MDBs), a leading group of finance institutions to channel resources to development goals.

Climate change mitigation has been politicized in many countries, potentially blocking the introduction of climate policies. Publicly funded green investment banks are one policy instrument that mobilizes private finance into national opportunities. ETH researchers incl. ISTP member Prof. Tobias Schmidt analysed the parliamentary discourse behind the design of two cases of green investment banks. Their results produce observations allowing to develop four propositions for further investigation.

Automated driving technology along with electric propulsion are widely expected to fundamentally change transport systems. In their study, ISTP member Prof. Kay W. Axhausen in collaboration with various colleagues analysed the production costs of various transport modes both today and in an automated-electric future. Their results indicate that transportation costs will become more similar across different countries and the highest impact of automation is to be expected in high-income countries.

Solar photovoltaics and batteries are key technologies to enable a rapid decarbonization of electricity systems. ETH Energy Politics Group´s researchers including ISTP Member Prof. Tobias Schmidt developed a model for photovoltaics and battery projects, which returns a profit-maximizing storage dispatch and system design, and investigated South-East Asian countries. Their results indicate that profitable investment opportunities in photovoltaics and battery projects exist already today.

Soil systems are important environmental assets as they are the basis for food production and of great importance for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. A recent paper by Thomas Sonderegger, in collaboration with ISTP Researchers Stephan Pfister and Prof. Stefanie Hellweg, deals with the limited available life cycle impact assessment methods for the natural resource soil. Their results indicate that a scenario without any conservation measures leads to substantial productivity losses.

A number of conditions must be met in order for utilization-focused policy advice to become a reality on a wider scale. Researchers from various institutes, including ISTP Member Prof. David Kaufmann, propose a six-point checklist for developing effective policy advice. They argue that in addition to invest in science communication for the general public and politicians, a specific form of policy advice, that is, policy-prescriptive evidence-based information, should become available. 

Societies face increasingly complex and dynamic problems, with climate change being one of the most notable examples. Researchers from the ETH Energy Politics Group, including ISTP member Prof. Tobias Schmidt, investigated the interaction between regulatory instruments to address such problems. Based on a case study on energy efficiency in buildings in Switzerland, they found a symbiotic interaction between public and private regulation that leads to ratcheting-up of regulatory stringency.

What does the COVID-19 crisis imply for the energy transition required to keep global warming at bay? A commentary written by Bjarne Steffen, Florian Egli, Michael Pahle and ETH Prof. Tobias Schmidt aims to help energy policymakers navigate through the crisis. In their view, structuring the challenges that arise in different time horizons and offering guiding principles for responses are most useful at this stage.

Dennis Kolcava, Lukas Rudolph and Prof. Thomas Bernauer examined public preferences on extraterritorial social and environmental regulation, corporate self-regulation, and the interplay between them. Their analysis, based on a vignette survey experiment in Switzerland, was published in Journal of European Public Policy.

An insightful study on the impact of on-farm storage by Dr. Michael Brander, ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer and Dr. Matthias Huss highlights the need for greater consideration of improved on-farm storage as a means for reducing severe food insecurity. The results of their study, which is based on a randomized control trial in Tanzania, and data collected through SMS-based mobile phone surveys, were published in Food Policy.

A new article on political populism and public support for climate mitigation by Dr. Robert A. Huber from University of Salzburg, PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich Lukas Paul Fesenfeld and ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer was published in Climate Policy. Their study assesses whether populism could affect citizen support for climate mitigation policies. It also investigates to what extent frames about elite responsiveness are important heuristics for individuals´ preferences concerning climate policies.

A new study on response preparedness to influenza epidemic by Marcello Marini & Dr. Ndaona Chokani from ETH Zurich, PhD Student at the ETH Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Sciences Cyril Brunner and ETH Prof. Reza S. Abhari was recently published in Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory. Their work is highly relevant to the current situation in light of latest developments in the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak.

A new article on food system transformation by PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich Lukas Paul Fesenfeld, Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich Michael Wicki, Dr Yixian Sun from the University of Bath, and ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer was published in Nature Food. This study examines how potentially effective policy instruments may be designed and combined so as to reduce public backlash and ensure political feasibility of transforming the food system.

An insightful article on the provision of humanitarian protection by Philipp Lutz, ETH Zurich Prof. David Kaufmann & Anna Stünzi was recently published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS).

A new review article by ETH Zurich Prof. Dr. Thomas Bernauer and Prof. Dr. Tobias Böhmelt from University of Essex on conflict and cooperation over transboundary freshwater resources was published in Nature Sustainability. This study documents the progress in understanding the drivers of water-related cooperation and conflict and indicates that, thus far, the prevailing response is cooperation, albeit non-violent conflict is quite frequent, too.

A recent publication on PS: Political Science & Politics by ETH Prof. David Kaufmann and Prof. Mara Sidney from Rutgers University-Newark on urban policy-making. This symposium suggests that to understand contemporary societal transformation — and political and policy processes more generally — the policies that cities create and implement are essential objects of study.

A recent publication on Global Environmental Politics by Prof. Dr. Thomas Bernauer and several colleagues from various institutions on reviewing the evolution of international environmental law.

Dr. Lukas Rudolph published an article in the Journal of European Public Policy analysing the role of turnout in the United Kingdom European Union membership (“Brexit”) referendum.

A recent publication on the Environmental Research Letters by Michael Wicki, Lukas Fesenfeld, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Bernauer on identifying politically feasible and effective policy-packages aimed at greening the transportation sector. They do so, using choice experiments with representative samples of citizens from China, Germany, and the USA.

A new publication by Fabian Willibald, Dr. Maarten Jan van Strien, Dr. Victor Blanco and Prof. Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey appeared in Applied Geography. It examines how landscape properties and accessibility are related to revealed outdoor recreation demand (i.e. number of day trips received by Swiss municipalities), and which variables are most important to predict demand for outdoor recreation day trips on a national scale.

A new publication on the Journal of Scientific Reports by Dr. Allister Loder, Lukas Ambühl, Prof. Dr. Monica Menendez and Prof. Dr. Kay W. Axhausen on how network topology affects the critical point of the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) and thus network-wide traffic. The findings make the critical point predictable and the MFD more reliable for economic and engineering applications as well as policy making.

A new publication on the Journal of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science by Marcello Marini, Anna P. Gawlikowska, Andrea Rossi, Dr. Ndaona Chokani, Prof. Hubert Klumpner and Prof. Dr. Reza S. Abhari on the development of a novel simulation framework based on agent-based modelling, which can be used to support the formulation of policies that can direct the transformation of urban areas.

Liam Beiser-McGrath and ETH Professor Thomas Bernauer examined whether revenue recycling could achieve sufficient public support for carbon taxes. Their research was published in Science Advances.

Michael Wicki, Robert Huber and Thomas Bernauer investigated whether policy-packaging increases public support for costly policies. Their research was published in the Journal of Public Policy.

A new publication on the Journal of Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory by Aleksandr Saprykin, Ndaona Chokani and Prof. Reza Abhari on the development of GEMSIM, an integrated solution to provide advanced traffic simulation and forecasting tools to planners and decision makers.

Prof. Thomas Bernauer, together with Brilé Anderson from the OECD and Prof. Aya Kachi from the University of Basel, investigated whether international pooling of authority affect the perceived legitimacy of global governance. Their research was published in an article in The Review of International Organizations.

A new publication by Prof. Dr. Thomas Bernauer and Prof. Dr. Vally Koubi on the Climate & Conflict blog of Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) about the policy implications, distributional effects & trade-offs when addressing climate change challenges.

What new governance arrangements do transnational dangers stimulate? ISTP’s Senior Researcher Jonas Hagmann’s unprecedentedly detailed, practice-oriented and inter-scalar cartography of Swiss security work published by SPSR, available open access.

ISTP's director Thomas Bernauer, Liam F. McGrath together with Aseem Prakash of University of Washington, recently published an article in Regulation & Governance. It deals with the question whether expemptions undermine environmental policy support. The authors investigate the odd-even road space rationing policy in India using a survey experiment.

The paper is co-authored by the Energy Politics Group’s (EPG) Martin Beuse, EPG's & ISTP's associate member Tobias Schmidt, as well as Prof. Vanessa Wood from ETH’s Electrical Engineering department.