What caught our eye - week 49
Are positive climate actions really cost free? Can property-linked finance unlock £ bns of investment? Electrification of agriculture
Here are three stories that we found particularly interesting this week and why. We also give our lateral thought on each one.
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Are positive climate actions really cost free?
Sorry for the apparent clickbait title, but it's a really important question that deserves our proper consideration. The short answer is probably not, but the issues relate to how people make decisions, not the financial case.
A recent piece of research, from a team at Yale, looks at this - starting from the apparent inconsistency between the bottom up and top down models. Put simply, the bottom up analysis comes up with a number of transitions where the cost of the switch is low. Sometimes zero. This makes sense if the alternative is cheaper. Which their analysis considers is the case for a large proportion of the transitions in energy and transport.
Before moving on, a really important fact. This bottom up analysis is not the work of a couple of researchers at some obscure university. It's the accepted 'gold standard' for many Sustainability Professionals - the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a detailed bottom up analysis, looking at the investment required sector by sector, and technology by technology.