City Silhouette, World Climate

A country's urban silhouettes prophesy its future climate policy, or so this paper argues. The more its city silhouettes are skewed to the periphery, the more likely a country is to implement the carbon tax. This is why the effect of a country's urban form on greenhouse gas emissions -- a bone of contention in the recent literature -- cannot be separated from that country's choice of carbon tax. From this paper's perspective, a country with greater city silhouette skews may emit less greenhouse gases not so much because its cities are more compact but because it places a higher price on carbon consumption

Interacting innovation investments and environmental performances: a dynamic impure public good model

This paper develops a theoretical model to study how investment decisions in innovation taken by a single agent are influenced by environmental externalities produced by investment decisions taken by other agents. The model acts in a dynamic framework, where knowledge stock represents the capital good on which investment decisions over time are taken. Knowledge stock is considered as an impure public good which is responsible for both private and public benefits. We first show that the reaction function between one representative agent’s investments in innovation and the other agents’ investments in the public characteristic of the impure public good has a positive slope under general conditions. We also find that its sensitiveness is affected by the elasticity of substitution in the benefit function as well as by the degree of complementarity between the private and the public characteristics

Protocol of an Interdisciplinary and Multidimensional Assessment of Pollution Reduction Measures in Urban Areas: MobilAir Project

International audienceMobility is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, urban air pollution is a major public health issue in both North and South countries. This project aims to show the synergies between short-term public health issues related to pollution and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. MobilAir, in a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach, aims to identify specific measures to significantly reduce urban air pollution and its impacts. Building on the multidisciplinary richness of the Grenoble campus, MobilAir will develop an integrated approach in the Grenoble urban area, a relevant pilot area. MobilAir aims to develop methods and tools that can be replicated in other cities in France or abroad. Specifically, MobilAir has three main objectives: (1) A better comprehension of the population’s exposure to pollution; (2) A detailed understanding of the determinants of mobility behaviour and (3) Support for public decision-making