Themenplattform "Grüne Transformation und Energiesysteme"

Financial markets can support the transition to a low-carbon economy by redirecting funds from highly emissive to clean investments. We study whether European stock markets incorporate carbon prices in company valuations and to what degree they discriminate between firms with different carbon intensities. Using a novel dataset of stock prices and carbon intensities of 338 European publicly traded companies between 2013 and 2021, we find a strongly statistically significant relationship between weekly carbon price changes and stock returns. Crucially, this relationship depends on firms' carbon intensity: the higher the carbon costs a firm faces, the poorer its stock performance during the periods of carbon price increases. Emissions that firms cover with free allowances however do not impact this relationship, illustrating how both carbon pricing and disclosures are needed for financial markets to foster climate change mitigation. The relationship we identify can provide an incentive for firms to decarbonise. We argue in favour of more ambitious carbon pricing policies, as this would strengthen the stock-market incentive channel while causing only limited financial stability risk for stocks.

The question of how sustainable innovations and how niche experimentation lead to systemic changes are a core motivation of sustainability transitions research. As an inherently interdisciplinary field, although this question is addressed from different academic perspectives, the dominant understanding of relevant scaling processes is grounded in concepts of growth, diffusion and expansion. This article contributes to the discussion of more nuanced understandings of scaling, acknowledging the value of ontological levels for analytic purposes, but also drawing on knowledge from socio-psychological and spatial perspectives. Alternative understandings of spatial and agency-related scaling approaches are discussed and compared. An integrative socio-spatial framework is developed, providing a mid-range framework capable of supporting analysis of transitions that connects different disciplinary perspectives within a level-based ontology. We use an illustrative case study and derive implications for how this can inform questions of scaling and particularly spatial upscaling of new ways of doing, thinking and organizing.

Nach dem Rückgang der wirtschaftlichen Aktivität und der Mobilität im Zuge der COVID-19-Krise sanken die Treibhausgasemissionen im Jahr 2020 laut Umweltbundesamt im Vergleich zu 2019 um 7,7% auf 73,6 Mio. t CO2-Äquivalente.