ALBERT

Description: This focus article traces the evolution of the voluntary carbon market (VCM), putting emphasis on the more recent developments following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. It focuses on the interplay between the privately governed VCM and the global climate regime under the United Nations (UN). For years, the VCM and the UN carbon market operated in parallel and mutually influenced each other. The adoption of the Paris Agreement, however, marked a turning point for the VCM. It triggered the proliferation of net zero targets, sparking the interest in the VCM as a supplier of carbon credits to offset companies' remaining emissions. At the same time, the global scope and ambitious targets set by the agreement have put the future of the VCM in limbo, raising concerns about double claiming and more generally, questioning the adequacy of offsetting. Considering these challenges, numerous stakeholders have started a process to redefine the rules of the market to ensure its credibility and legitimacy. While some areas of convergence were identified, the VCM's private governance has long been unable to address the question of how to deal with double claiming and the claims companies should be allowed to make. In this situation, signals from international policy and regulation under national policy point the way forward for the VCM. By moving from offsetting toward a contribution claim model, the VCM may overcome its "identity crisis" and find a new place within the broader climate change regime.

Description: In this perspective paper, we propose to integrate the concepts of Mobility-as-a-Feature (MaaF, an extension of MaaS) and the 15-minute city (15mC). The 15mC concept maintains that daily necessities and services, such as shopping, healthcare, and leisure should be accessible without private cars within 15 minute. In line with MaaF, these services could be integrated with a variety of mobility options into a single app. This novel approach is poised to offer a seamless customer experience, better resource utilization, enhanced urban mobility, improved and more inclusive access to services, and greater community connectivity. We call them local super apps: a new model to drive equitable and sustainable urban transitions. We substantiate this preliminary idea with evidence from literature, practical applications, and a user survey (N = 1,019), while also discussing future research avenues to further develop the concept of local super apps.

Description: The implementation of the circular economy is crucial to combat climate change especially in energy- and carbon-intensive sectors like the steel industry. It requires the environmental assessment of circular interventions to steel products to ensure that they are in line with targets of the circular economy - increase of resource efficiency and sustainability. Based on previous case studies and established methodologies, an environmental assessment framework is suggested and applied. It comprises a Material Flow Analysis to quantify selected mass-based indicators to evaluate the parameters of circular economy, as well as a Life Cycle Assessment to quantify the difference of the environmental impact. The application to a case study in the metalworking industries shows that the implementation of repurposing to a machining knife and hand tools contributes to all circular economy strategies - narrowing, slowing, and closing. At first, however, the circular intervention did not lead to a reduction of the environmental impact. It was found that the optimization of share of secondary material, energy mix, grinding, and transportation can lower the environmental impact of the circular compared to the conventional product system. Considering the increased product functionality, the environmental performance of the circular product system is superior. The study shows the importance of integrating assessment methods covering the resource level and environmental sustainability since focusing only on the resource efficiency can be misleading. At the same time, it stresses the need to apply environmental assessments in the product development stage to design environmentally sustainable and resource-efficient product systems.

Description: The twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai among many other items concluded the first Global Stocktake (GST) under the Paris Agreement. This article discusses the conference's outcomes in the areas of mitigation, loss and damage, adaptation, climate finance, and cooperation under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The conference arguably made history by for the first time ever recognising the need to "transition away" from fossil fuels, adopting specific targets for the scale-up of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and by operationalising a fund to support developing countries in dealing with loss and damage caused by climate change. However, the legal language in the call for an energy transition is relatively non-committal and the conference failed to underpin the new global objectives with adequate resources. Actual implementation of the Dubai outcomes will therefore to a large extent depend on whether COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan - already billed as "finance COP" - will be able to cut the Gordian knot of finance.

Description: North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is the industrial center of Germany and one of the most important industrial locations in Europe. It is a key location for the energy-intensive basic materials industry like the production of steel and non-ferrous metals, (petro)chemicals, cement and lime, bricks, glass and ceramics, and paper. Around 20 % of NRW's total greenhouse emissions derive from industrial processes. By 2045, industry must achieve climate-neutrality, which requires a massive transformation effort. Technologically, this needs large-scale utilization of green hydrogen, carbon management, consequent circular economy, and climate-neutral production of process heat. Furthermore, various adjustments to the policy framework are essential.

Description: Over 175 million Nigerians rely on the use of traditional biomass for cooking, and it is estimated that more than 128,000 people died in Nigeria in 2019 from household air pollution related to these fuels. There is currently a gap in the study of possible pathways to meet Nigeria's goals in clean cooking and in understanding the health and climate impacts that different pathways can bring about. We explore clean cooking access scenarios for Nigeria until 2060 under a business-as-usual scenario, a moderate climate mitigation scenario, and an ambitious transformative scenario. We carry out a disaggregation at the state level for the period up to 2030 to better guide shorter-term policy development. Our analysis shows that under an ambitious scenario where 85 million households achieve access to clean cooking by 2060, annual premature deaths due to exposure to household air pollution would decrease by 7 % compared to 2018 levels. A baseline scenario, on the other hand, sees a dramatic 77 % increase, resulting in 209,000 people dying prematurely, of which 94,000 children under 5. Furthermore, we find that woodfuel removals from forestland would lead to a tripling of carbon dioxide emissions from land use change, reaching 602 Mt CO2 by 2060. Our findings stress the vital importance of a clean cooking transition in Nigeria and underline the urgent need for immediate acceleration in national efforts regarding access to clean cooking for all.

Description: The goal of this dissertation is to facilitate the assessment of impacts from sustainable measures and projects with an emphasis on impact reporting for Green, Social or Sustainability Bonds in the Sustainable Finance market. It does so by providing analysts with the means to develop, depict, formulate, and assess a causal hypothesis between an intervention and its subsequent effects in an impact-chain, represented by desired environmental (E), social (S) or governance (G) changes. This is achieved by developing a methodology for so-called ESG Logic Models or ESG-LM, that combine heuristic Theories-of-Change with propositional logic and Bayesian Reasoning. Three research questions are investigated and responded to. Research Question 1 asks how such Theories-of-Change can be developed for any type of ESG-related issue and how the different process steps in a causal chain can be classified, hierarchised, and prioritised regarding their efficacy towards overarching sustainability goals and their plausibility. Research Question 2 studies (a) the means by which the analyst or any other interested third party might be warranted in believing the causal claims from an ESG-LM, and (b) how an ESG-LM can be improved if this credence is low. Research Question 3 then looks at the reporting of impacts themselves regarding indicator selection, indicator assessment and indicator quantification as well as the provision of information on the contributions and attributions by different actors. The dissertation draws on a variety of theories and adapts existing methods to achieve that. It operationalises concepts from empirical Sustainable Finance research and already existing impact assessment methodologies. It adapts scholarly and practitioner approaches for theory-based evaluation and applies a qualitative social science perspective towards theory-building and evaluation, while some of the assessment tools in the dissertation are grounded in Logic, Set Theory and Bayesian Epistemology. Examples for such tools include rules for the Attribution by actors, heuristics for the abduction of plausible outcome pathways, or a four-stage Argument and Decision-Tree to assess the credibility of ESG-LM claims (based on Bayes Theorem). My assessment of the entire methodology is positive overall, as it provides solutions to each of the three research areas. Limitations of the approach, and thus opportunities for further research, are the additional expertise and time required by analysts compared to the existing, and somewhat more pragmatic, solutions in the current market. However, this is outweighed in my opinion by the ability of the framework to strongly mitigate impact washing by actors in the financial markets as well as biases by analysts. Its overall methodology also provides opportunities for new research angles in the area of sustainability indicators and assessments.

Description: Education for Sustainable Development requires raising individuals' awareness of problems relevant to the environment. We designed a Generative Toolkit that supports industrial design students carrying out a Speculative Design task and through this process initiates greater problem awareness of low metal recycling rates. In this paper we give insights into the Toolkit's theoretical derivation and the design process. Findings from testing suggest that there are several opportunities for improvement, such as considering further content-related competencies in the Toolkit's design.