Monasterolo Co-Edits Special Issue of Ecological Economics on Climate Economics and Finance
Irene Monasterolo, a Visiting Research Fellow and a former post-doctoral associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Ecological Economics with Andrea Roventini and Tim Foxon. The special issue, titled “Understanding uncertainty of climate policies and implications for economics and finance: an evolutionary economics approach,” contains an editorial and nine papers exploring the implications of climate policies for economics and finance.
Monasterolo and her co-editors argue that traditional models aiming to assess the socioeconomic and financial impacts of climate change cannot fully account for the risks and opportunities of aligning financial markets with global climate goals, thus creating a major source of uncertainty for policy makers and investors. In response, they propose a new wave of agent-based and network models rooted in evolutionary economics and complexity science to complement traditional climate economics models, effectively embracing the uncertainty caused by climate impacts — as well as the reaction to those impacts — on socioeconomic systems.
The special issue’s nine papers were presented at the Special Session of the Research Area “Environment-Economics Interactions” of the European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE)’s conference in 2016. By introducing conceptual and methodological innovations in climate economics and finance, the articles analyze the conditions for effective policies and financial instruments to achieve the 2 °C target.
Read the full special issue here.