In the past days I attended the annual conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE), which this year was held in Athens, being organized by the International Centre for Research on the Environment and the Economy (ICRE8). The EAERE conference is one of the most important events in our research field and it was one of the main reasons why I organized my European break precisely in this period. Unsurprisingly, it was worth to be there because I had the chance of taking part in very interesting sessions.

Not only did I attend the conference, but I also gave a presentation. Indeed, it was about a topic that I had not mentioned until now in this blog. The presentation in fact refers to an activity that I had begun working on before starting the MERCURY project and that I would like to continue within this project as a complementary task, within the Work Package 3.

The topic refers to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the targets fixed by the United Nations to drive global sustainable development assuming 2030 as a time horizon. In its current, preliminary version, the paper has a twofold objective: on the one hand it shows that SDG 7 (the SDG dedicated to energy) can be considered as an enabling factor for the implementation of the other SDGs, and in particular of SDG 13 (the goal on climate action); on the other hand, it discusses how technology innovation, especially in the electricity sector, which is fundamental in the SDG 7 perspective, can promote the achievement of a low-carbon energy system.

As one can see, power technologies are not explicitly mentioned here, but the work deals with energy and climate change, so it can suitably be included in MERCURY’s WP3, which is about technology prospects within global climate policies.

You can find the presentation here.