Climate

We aim to stimulate discussion on how innovation research within marketing can use a better world (BW) perspective to help innovation become a driver of positive change in the world. In this "Challenging the Boundaries" series paper, we hope to provide purposeful research opportunities for scholars seeking to bridge innovation research with the BW movement. We frame our discussion with four areas of innovation research in marketing that are particularly relevant to BW objectives.

The use of private capital to finance biodiversity conservation and restoration is a new practice in sustainable finance. This study sheds light on this new practice. First, we provide a conceptual framework that lays out how biodiversity can be financed by pure private capital and blended financing structures. In the latter, private capital is blended with public or philanthropic capital, whose aim is to de-risk private capital investments.

Although US President-elect Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans give climate advocates plenty to worry about, all hope is not lost. Clean-energy technologies still have decisive physical advantages over the alternatives, and economic common sense will eventually win out.

Significance: Estimating the social cost of carbon (SCC)—the cost of one additional ton of CO2 emitted—is crucial for the analysis of climate change policies. Despite numerous recent studies investigating how fundamental aspects of model structure affect SCC evaluation, findings are scattered, making the relative importance of different modeling elements hard to establish. This paper synthesizes results from the published literature over the last 20 y, revealing a wide range of SCC estimates.

On climate and especially environmental policy, the return of Donald Trump to the White House is clearly bad news. But the outlook is uncertain, because Trump has sent mixed signals about the kinds of policy changes he might pursue, and it remains to be seen what effect he can have on broader technological and market trends.

Iron ore + coal = iron + carbon dioxide. This chemical reaction, known long before the invention of the periodic table, is a key part of the steelmaking process and has helped build the modern world. But every tonne of iron generates more than two tonnes of CO₂, giving the iron and steel sector outsize importance in addressing climate change: it is responsible for one-tenth of global annual greenhouse gas emissions.

The Austrian capital has been spared the worst of recent flooding. Its experience could be a lesson in how to tackle the climate crisis.

In this paper we assess the economic impacts of moving to a renewable-dominated grid in the US. We use projections of capital costs to develop price bounds on future wholesale power prices at the local geographic level. We then use a class of spatial general equilibrium models to estimate the effect on wages and output of prices falling below these bounds in the medium term. Power prices fall anywhere between 20% and 80%, depending on local solar resources, leading to an aggregate real wage gain of 2-3%.

The extent of future climate change is largely a policy choice. We illuminate this choice with climate policy curves (CPCs), which link climate policies to subsequent global temperatures. The estimated downward sloping CPCs highlight the key trade-off between initial policy ambition, expressed via an overall effective carbon price, and the subsequent policy burden left for future generations. We also demonstrate how different CPCs can illustrate the range of climate policy paths towards attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals.