16 research outputs found
Understanding the Circular Economy in Europe, from Resource Efficiency to Sharing Platforms: The CEPS Framework. CEPS Special Report No. 143 / July 2016
This paper aims to rethink the concept of the âcircular economyâ through the prism of
its relevance to its many stakeholders, ranging from public and private actors and
mature and emerging industries to cities and regions, SMEs and multiâsectoral
corporations. The paper presents a schematic framework, which breaks down the
circular economy into eight fundamental building blocks and shows how they are
interconnected in relation to the multiplicity of involved actors. The framework is
used to develop recommendations addressed to European policyâmakers on how
best to support the transition towards a circular economy in the EU.Â
Innovative financing models for low carbon transitions: Exploring the case for revolving funds for domestic energy efficiency programmes
The IEA has estimated that over the next four decades US$31 trillion will be required to promote energy efficiency in buildings. However, the opportunities to make such investments are often constrained, particularly in contexts of austerity. We consider the potential of revolving funds as an innovative financing mechanism that could reduce investment requirements and enhance investment impacts by recovering and reinvesting some of the savings generated by early investments. Such funds have been created in various contexts, but there has never been a formal academic evaluation of their potential to contribute to low carbon transitions. To address this, we propose a generic revolving fund model and apply it using data on the costs and benefits of domestic sector retrofit in the UK. We find that a revolving fund could reduce the costs of domestic sector retrofit in the UK by 26%, or ÂŁ9 billion, whilst also making such a scheme cost-neutral, albeit with significant up-front investments that would only pay for themselves over an extended period of time. We conclude that revolving funds could enable countries with limited resources to invest more heavily and more effectively in low carbon development, even in contexts of austerity
Games as boundary objects: charting trade-offs in sustainable livestock transformation
Attempts to structurally transform segments of the agri-food system inevitably involve trade-offs between the priorities of actors with different incentives, perspectives and values. Trade-offs are context-specific, reflecting different socio-economic and political realities. We investigate the potential of structured boundary objects to facilitate exposing and reconciling these trade-offs within the context of multi-stakeholder social learning processes with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Building on boundary objects as items flexible enough to be understood by all without having one common definition, structured boundary objects visualize actorsâ input in a comparable format to facilitate knowledge sharing. Stakeholders in each country used a simulation tool and board game to explore the implications of changing livestock stocking and management practices for the environment and for actorsâ future socio-economic priorities. Using structured boundary objects elicited trade-offs between household food and animal feed, and between livestock for income, labour, and/ or cultural functions, reflecting the context-specific and subjective evaluations actors make when attempting to plan livelihood changes. Our findings suggest to policy and decision-makers that sustainable transition plans can be developed when stakeholders in local agri-food systems employ approaches that allow shared understandings of trade-offs inherent to sustainable agriculture to emerge
Games as boundary objects: charting trade-offs in sustainable livestock transformation
Attempts to structurally transform segments of the agri-food system inevitably involve trade-offs between the priorities of actors with different incentives, perspectives and values. Trade-offs are context-specific, reflecting different socio-economic and political realities. We investigate the potential of structured boundary objects to facilitate exposing and reconciling these trade-offs within the context of multi-stakeholder social learning processes with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Building on boundary objects as items flexible enough to be understood by all without having one common definition, structured boundary objects visualize actorsâ input in a comparable format to facilitate knowledge sharing. Stakeholders in each country used a simulation tool and board game to explore the implications of changing livestock stocking and management practices for the environment and for actorsâ future socio-economic priorities. Using structured boundary objects elicited trade-offs between household food and animal feed, and between livestock for income, labour, and/ or cultural functions, reflecting the context-specific and subjective evaluations actors make when attempting to plan livelihood changes. Our findings suggest to policy and decision-makers that sustainable transition plans can be developed when stakeholders in local agri-food systems employ approaches that allow shared understandings of trade-offs inherent to sustainable agriculture to emerge
The economics of green transition strategies for cities: Can low carbon,energy efficient development approaches be adapted to demand side urban water efficiency?
Cities are major contributors to global emissions, producers of waste and consumers of resources such as
energy, water and food: implementing green development strategies is hence a core challenge of modern
city-planning. The attention of research has been focusing on the development of energy efficient, low
carbon strategies, yet city decision-makers need truly integrated approaches, as the one proposed by the
water-energy-food Nexus. The purpose of our paper is to investigate whether it is possible to take one
step in this direction by extending existing approaches to energy efficiency strategies to progressively
include other priority resources, in particular water. To test this hypothesis we have taken a robust and
well accepted methodology, the ELCC (Economics of Low Carbon development strategies for Cities)
developed by SEI and CCCEP, and we have extended it to the case of demand side water efficiency
strategies for cities. We have then applied the adapted ELCC framework to the case study of the domestic
sector of the city of Bologna (Italy), identifying and prioritizing several efficiency measures. Measures
were evaluated through their capital investment, annual values of savings, payback period and reduction
in consumption, and then aggregated in different scenarios in order to highlight potential urban
investments and to showcase a possible approach to the prioritization of demand side water efficiency
measures. The results show that, with an upfront investment of s 17 million, a feasible subset of
Bolognaâs households could be equipped with
five selected cost-effective measures, generating annual
savings of s 10.2 million and reducing the total domestic water consumption of 34% by 2020 compared to
the 2012 initial value. With additional s 28.5 million, households could be equipped with more costly
appliances reaching an overall water reduction of 37% by 2020. Our
findings confirm that it is possible to
successfully extend current approaches to urban energy efficiency strategies to include demand side
water efficiency, adding an important building block to the construction of an integrated Nexus-based
approach to green development strategies at the city-level. We encourage further tests to confirm the
robustness of the methodology