ALBERT

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: Carrying out laboratory experiments is usually a time-consuming process. In addition, the options for varying parameter studies are limited and adjustments to the design of the measuring equipment are often not possible at all. In order to circumvent these limitations, we supplement our laboratory experiments with virtual experiments as best as possible. For this purpose, we have expanded our finite element library FEMALY [1] to include the so-called complete electrode model [2], which allows us to simulate electrodes of any shape for DC and IP applications and also provides us with explicit mathematical expressions for calculating sensitivities [3]. As a first case study, we consider an IP measurement on a measuring cylinder with embedded ring electrodes to virtually reproduce the time-varying change of the apparent resistivity for laboratory tracer experiments (Figure 1). We present the real and imaginary part of the sensitivity distribution of the underlying measurement configuration that confirms our initial assumption that the actual electrode surface shape has a relatively small influence on the observed measurement quantities.

Description: The Atacama Desert along the Chilean Coastal Cordillera is a unique landscape to understand the Earth's evolution in hyper-arid and arid environments. The Paranal clay pan has studied by the CRC 1211 project to recover a continuous climate record for paleoclimate research. The goal is to provide the sedimentary architecture and bedrock topography of the Paranal site by interpreting multidimensional inversion of loop source transient electromagnetic (TEM) data. A total of 133 TEM soundings were carried out using a central loop configuration, with a transmitter loop size of 40×40 m2 and a receiver of about 10×10 m2. The TEM data was processed and analyzed, exhibiting high-quality data, with an average of noise level of about ηnoi = 3·10−10V/Am2. The 1D Occam inversion results exhibits a clear three-layered resistivitydepth structure with a second conductive layer of roughly 20 Ωm. The clay pan's resistivity distribution is well-resolved with a global misfit of around 1.1. However, the study site showed 2D effects that were stronlgy visible at the edges of the clay pan, leading to misinterpretations of the TEM data. This was confirmed based on 2D forward modelling. In this manner, to better deal with the observed 2D distortions in the TEM data and to derive a more accurate geometry of the clay pan, the recently developed Julia Package (3DTEMinv) for time-domain 3D inversion and modeling data was performed. The resulting 3D inversion presents a high convergence rate, and acceptable solutions are obtained after ten iterations with a good misfit of about 1.6. The 3D model exhibits a well-resolved geometry of the clay pan, with a high resolution of the derived conductive body. The drill core results confirm the 1D and 3D TEM models at the center of the clay pan, which is in good agreement with the resulting lithology with a maximum thickness of about 171 m depth and a weathered granodioritic bedrock below. These results agree with the local and regional geological context, improving the understanding of sediment deposition and transportation in this hilly and arid environment.