Local economic impacts of wind power deployment in Denmark

An argument sometimes used to support renewable energy is that it may contribute to job creation. On the other hand, these technologies often face local opposition. On the case of Denmark, the country with the longest experience with wind power, we examine whether the installation of new turbines had local economic benefits. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit time and regional variations at the municipal level. We find that the deployment of wind power contributed to the increase in personal income for entrepreneurs and some retirees. As municipalities received payments from wind investors ahead of the construction, the new wind revenues were followed by increases in local public spending. Regarding employment, we find very minor effects in some sectors but the aggregate local employment does not change significantly

Climate finance and emission reductions: What do the last twenty years tell us?

In the framework of the Paris Agreement implementation, financial transfers remain a major point of negotiation for addressing equity concerns raised by the ambitious climate objectives. In complement to the theoretical, experimental and numerical studies that have examined the role of transfers in facilitating coalitions, we conduct the first empirical analysis of their impact on national carbon emission reductions. We build on the existing literature to develop a conceptual framework which models continuous national emission choices in the presence of financial transfers. We infer an equation of the impact of mitigation and adaptation finance on national emissions of recipient countries. We test the derived hypothesis using carbon emissions data of non-OECD countries in the last 20 years. We find that public adaptation and mitigation finance tend to increase emissions. Private mitigation finance seems to reduce them only after five years following the transfers

Fungal functional ecology : bringing a trait-based approach to plant-associated fungi

Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro-organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there still exist key gaps in our ecological knowledge of this kingdom, especially related to function. Trait-based approaches have been instrumental in strengthening our understanding of plant functional ecology and, as such, provide excellent models for deepening our understanding of fungal functional ecology in ways that complement insights gained from traditional and -omics-based techniques. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge of fungal functional ecology, taxonomy and systematics and introduce a novel database of fungal functional traits (FunFun). FunFun is built to interface with other databases to explore and predict how fungal functional diversity varies by taxonomy, guild, and other evolutionary or ecological grouping variables. To highlight how a quantitative trait-based approach can provide new insights, we describe multiple targeted examples and end by suggesting next steps in the rapidly growing field of fungal functional ecology