Conference Agenda

Driving Restrictions: Lessons and Challenges from Over 50 Years of Experience\n\nJuan-Pablo Montero, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile\nThis presentation reviews over fifty years of experience with driving restrictions, assessing when they reduce congestion and pollution and when they backfire. Drawing on evidence from Mexico City, Santiago, Bogotá, and Madrid, it shows that uniform license-plate restrictions can be counterproductive by encouraging purchases of second-hand polluting vehicles, delaying fleet renewal, or extending the life of older cars. By contrast, vintage-specific restrictions and low-emission zones can perform well when targeted at the most polluting vehicles and designed with long-run fleet responses in mind. Restrictions aimed at reducing congestion can also improve welfare when drivers can pay an exemption fee. The presentation emphasizes extensive versus intensive margins of adjustment, distributional impacts, and the role of commitment when “transition technologies,” such as hybrid vehicles, are temporarily exempted.\n

EAERE AWARDS\nThe following awards and recognitions will be announced in 2026:\n\nEAERE Fellowswww.eaere.org/fellows \nEuropean Award for Researchers in Environmental Economics under the Age of Fortywww.eaere.org/award-for-researchers-under-the-age-of-forty\nEAERE Award for Outstanding Publication in the Journal Environmental and Resource Economicswww.eaere.org/outstanding-publication-in-ere\nEAERE Award for Best Doctoral Dissertations in Environmental and Resource Economicswww.eaere.org/best-european-doctoral-dissertation-award/\nEAERE Award for ERC Grants Laureates in the Field of Environmental and Resource Economicswww.eaere.org/erc-grants-laureates/\nEAERE European Practitioner Achievement Award in Applying Environmental Economicshttps://www.eaere.org/practitioner-achievement-award/\n\n\nThe Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economicshttps://www.eaere.org/erik-kempe-award\n

Summary: Climate policy for farming generally and for ruminant/dairy farming in particular is partial and largely ineffective; the ideas of economists are not prominent in its design and delivery. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is the leading environmental non-governmental organization that uses teams of economists and scientists to inform and drive its advocacy. The purpose of this theme is to understand the gaps that make progress difficult; to use insight from best practise to help find ways that work to make progress at scale; and in particular to identify where economists can maximize their contribution.\n \nWhy 1? – Many Gaps: Where climate policy exists for farming, it is much weaker than policies for other sectors. Specifically: It is not obligatory (‘opt in’); data on greenhouse gas emissions at farm level are often inadequate; limited measures available to reduce emissions (in dairy, ~60% of emissions are enteric methane although where production is inefficient enteric emission reductions are feasible); innovation bias – most investment therein favours indoor containment systems, but globally most dairy farming is pasture-based. Action incurs diseconomies of scale - a preponderance of small farms which are often associated with farm owners who are old, with limited formal education, difficulties in accessing capital; limited or no capacity to use IT.\n \nWhy 2? - The Economics Gap: There is: unwillingness to use prices to incentivize emissions’ reductions; low attention to cost effective use of subsidies or supply chain incentives; no information to consumers on the carbon efficiency (CO2e/kg) of what they consume.\n \nBut there are exceptions - Learning from Experience: A few jurisdictions have taken actions from which we can learn. California has legislated for disclosure of emissions information by companies above a certain size threshold including Scope 3 (farm based) and has designed and delivered subsidy programmes to reduce emissions starting in 2015. Such actions are limited to willing regulators, and a good understanding and acceptance of political economy limitations is therefore crucial. Learning from doing is the best learning: this is epitomized bynew developments inDenmark as well as on-going activityin the European Union and in China, illustrate the differing political economy issues at play, as well as the need to approach dairy sectors of different compositions (predominantly intensive vs extensive, in-door, roaming cattle etc) with different economic solutions.\n\nInsights from California and China: Britt GroosmanInsights from the European Union:Christian HolzleitnerInsights from Denmark: Pernille BirchInsights from the dairy industry: Chris AdamoKey Points for Policy: Frank J. Convery

The bioeconomy is a broad and transformative concept centered on the sustainable use of renewable biological resources—agriculture, forestry, fisheries, marine systems, and microbial platforms—combined with biotechnology, engineering, and digital tools to produce an expanding portfolio of goods and services. Historically, biological systems supplied food, feed, and fiber. Today, their contributions have expanded to include fuels, biomaterials, biochemicals, carbon-sequestration pathways, environmental services, and forms of recreation and ecological restoration. The bioeconomy thus provides the foundations of a sustainable, circular, and climate-smart economic system.\n\nBecause modern society remains deeply dependent on non-renewable resources—especially fossil fuels—the bioeconomy provides a crucial pathway for transitioning to renewable sources of energy, materials, and production processes. Realizing this transition requires innovations that increase productivity, reduce pressure on land and water, valorize agricultural and forestry residues, curb pollution, and create new bio-based value chains that enhance rural incomes while improving environmental outcomes. These innovations offer solutions to climate change, rural poverty, biodiversity loss, and the food–fuel dilemma. \n\nRecognizing its strategic importance, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), through its CASA-Bio task force, has proposed a $5 billion research initiative to advance the bioeconomy. Similarly, the European Union, Brazil, and China have launched major policy frameworks and investments to support bioeconomy research and commercialization. However, realizing the promise of the bioeconomy requires more than scientific breakthroughs. It depends on the development of robust and scalable supply chains, effective policies, and institutional frameworks that can support innovation, mobilize investment, and integrate new bio-based industries with existing economic systems. NSF and other funding agencies have explicitly identified policy design and supply-chain development as key challenges in this transition. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool in addressing climate and energy challenges. The application of AI in climate and energy economics provides new methods for analyzing complex systems, predicting environmental outcomes, optimizing energy use, and developing robust policy frameworks. This session will explore the intersection of AI with climate and energy economics, focusing on the methods AI uses to assess climate impacts, the evidence AI can provide for decision-making, and the policy insights that emerge from these technological advancements. The session will discuss how AI can help policymakers, businesses, and researchers shape sustainable and efficient energy systems, and how it can drive innovations in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. It will be of particular relevance to environmental and natural resource economists by offering new perspectives and methodologies that bridge science, policy, and business to tackle pressing climate challenges. 

Nature holds vast potential to avoid or mitigate climate-warming emissions. To date, the global community has struggled to scale up funding for protecting and stewarding nature at a speed appropriate to the size of this opportunity— _or of the risk posed by continued loss of the hundreds of gigatons of carbon stored in ecosystems.\n \nScaling up funding for such efforts in a credible, effective, and equitable way comes with challenges. These include fundamental accounting-linked challenges, such as credible quantification of carbon impacts in complex natural systems, or demonstrating additionality and permanence. Others are more expansive market- and system-level challenges, including finance flows, questions of national sovereignty, and ensuring equitable processes and outcomes at both local and jurisdictional levels.\n\nThis innovation-focused session will highlight a set of novel or evolving concepts, each with potential to address core challenges to enabling large-scale funding for nature-based carbon storage and removals, whether through credit markets and other incentive mechanisms. Audience-involved joint discussion, facilitated by the session organizer, will then guide participants to identify synergies and transferrable lessons across these emerging frameworks, highlighting principles that could bolster other emerging efforts to scale up funding and incentives for impactful climate action.

The aim of this session is discuss promising new mechanisms for upscaling financial contributions to global mitigation and for increasing effectiveness of spending. Focus will be on two concepts: tax coalitions, e.g. on taxing international aviation or maritime shipping, and jurisdictional reward funds, that reward governments rather than projects for proven emission reductions. We discuss existing examples for such approaches as well as proposals for setting up new mechanisms (e.g. Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility, launched at COP30; possibilities of rewarding countries for increasing domestic effective carbon prices). The session will also shed light on challenges, obstacles and potential solutions to enhance these approaches. 

This session brings together distinguished environmental economists to reflect on what makes research endure — from choosing a question, to research design, to writing and publication. The panel offers something rare: retrospective wisdom from scholars whose work has stood the test of time, offered to an audience at the frontier of the field. The session will be structured as a moderated discussion, with questions agreed upon in advance, brief opening remarks from each panelist, and ample time for audience Q&A. 

Marine resource policies are implemented in the presence of important constraints and frictions: limited state capacity, political pressure to protect small operators and communities, and imperfect information in decentralized markets. This session links four papers that study how these real-world considerations shape outcomes in fisheries and marine conservation. Two papers study quota markets by recovering implicit quota values from bundled asset transactions and by identifying systematic price patterns in bilateral ITQ bargaining—both highlighting how rules and information frictions affect efficiency and distribution. The third paper evaluates whether conservation policy can improve human outcomes, estimating the causal effect of MPAs on multidimensional well-being in coastal Indonesia. The fourth paper studies compliance when output rights are infeasible, showing when input subsidies can outperform enforcement. Together, the papers provide complementary evidence on institutional design, incentives, and welfare in ocean governance.

Climate change is increasingly experienced through more frequent and severe climate shocks and natural disasters, with consequences that extend well beyond immediate economic and environmental damages. By increasing salience, shaping beliefs and risk perceptions, and affecting political and behavioral responses, these shocks influence individual behavior, electoral outcomes, and policy incentives. Understanding how climate-related shocks translate into political accountability, belief updating, and behavioral change is therefore central to the political economy of climate change.\n \nThe five papers in this thematic session examine complementary dimensions of these processes by linking climate shocks to voter behavior, political accountability, belief formation, and government responses.\n \nStorming the Ballot Box analyzes how extreme precipitation affects voter turnout and vote choice in Italy, emphasizing the role of timing, recency, and shock salience. Natural Disasters and Electoral Consequences provides evidence from U.S. presidential elections, jointly studying turnout and incumbent vote share to distinguish participation effects from retrospective voting and to assess the mediating role of disaster declarations and political alignment. My Shock Hit Differently focuses on the policy response side, documenting how hydrogeological shocks influence intergovernmental transfers in Italy and how partisan alignment shapes post-disaster fund allocation. Floods, Public Budgets and Fiscal Resilience examines how Italian municipalities adjust revenues and expenditures following floods and landslides, highlighting heterogeneity in fiscal responses driven by local fiscal capacity and resilience. Complementing these contributions, The Wind Is Changing: Hurricanes and Climate Change Perceptions studies how extreme weather events shape climate change beliefs and behavioral intentions. Drawing on survey data from two U.S. cities, the paper shows that conservatives update their climate change perceptions more than liberals following hurricanes, a pattern driven by ceiling effects and mediated by news media coverage.\n \nThe papers provide an integrated empirical perspective on how climate shocks affect political behavior, belief formation, accountability mechanisms, and public policy responses. All contributions rely on state-of-the-art administrative, survey, electoral, and geospatial data combined with modern quasi-experimental methods, highlighting both short-run responses to extreme events and broader implications for political economy<v and climate adaptation.

As biodiversity loss accelerates and climate commitments require scaling conservation interventions, understanding what drives effective conservation outcomes has become increasingly urgent. This session brings together rigorous empirical evidence on public understanding of biodiversity crises, behavioural drivers of nature action and conservation and landscape policy effectiveness.\n \nThe four papers span diverse contexts and methods yet share a common goal: bridging the gap between public understanding, intention and action about biodiversity conservation using behavioural and policy effectiveness insights. The first paper examines global public understanding of the risk of a sixth mass extinction (in India, UK, Brazil, South Africa and USA), uncovering an awareness-acceptance paradox with implications for conservation education, communication and behavioural interventions. The second paper experimentally tests behavioural interventions from incentives to boosts for nature conservation, comparing expert predictions against actual effectiveness. The final papers examine long-term impacts of major conservation interventions (REDD+ in Sierra Leone and Protected Areas in Bolivia), revealing that program effectiveness depends critically on-site selection and economic alternatives.\n \nTogether, these contributions advance environmental and resource economics by: (1) identifying critical cognitive and perceptual gaps in public understanding that influence political feasibility of transformative action (2) testing behavioural mechanisms that may directly enhance nature conservation engagement (3) providing rare long-run causal evidence on market-based and regulatory conservation instruments. Taken together, the session will explore how psychological, social, economic and environmental factors shape conservation outcomes through varied mechanisms. The session connects micro-level behavioural insights with macro-level policy evaluation, offering complementary perspectives on designing more effective conservation strategies.

This thematic session ncludes five high-quality, empirical papers related to various dimensions of energy inequality and energy poverty in low- and middle-country settings, considering the two dimensions of energy access tracked under Sustainable Development Goal 7, namely cooking energy and electricity. It is increasingly apparent that simple binary metrics related to energy access are insufficient for capturing energy deprivations, so the session will engage with the complex dynamics of energy transitions and their implications. With regards to cooking energy, the papers will consider the drivers of fuel choices and stacking behaviors in Nigeria, focusing especially on intra-household aspects, the adoption and disadoption dynamics surrounding improved technologies in urban Rwanda, and the implications of cooking energy use for longer-term human capital outcomes that are linked to opportunities, considering the transition to LPG in Indonesia). The electricity papers will consider two dimensions of inequality linked to electricity reliability and strategies to cope with it, focusing on household energy use and adoption of rooftop solar in Cape Town, South Africa, and on the implications for mortality, of reliable health facility electricity supply, using data from 3 provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).\n \nIn integrating evidence across diverse developing contexts (different countries, and covering urban and rural areas) and applying rigorous empirical economics methods, the set of papers will enhance understanding of the economics of energy, environmental externalities, preferences and welfare, and climate change and the global environment

According to IEA-EDGAR CO2 data released in 2025, Asia’s share of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion substantially increased from 25% in 1990 to 53% in 2024. While emissions in EU27 countries rose by approximately 1.7 times over the same period, emissions in Asian countries increased by about 3.8 times due to rapid economic growth driven by energy-intensive industrialisation and a continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Given Asia’s dominant and growing contribution to global carbon emissions, achieving global net-zero targets will be unattainable without substantial and sustained mitigation efforts in Asia.\n \nThe surge in fossil fuel consumption and associated carbon emissions has generated significant environmental and political pressures, which collectively prompted governments to recognise the necessity of transitioning toward low-carbon development pathways. Environmental problems, notably air pollution, became increasingly visible and difficult to ignore. Moreover, as global temperatures rise, the region has experienced more severe and frequent extreme weather events that inflicted serious socioeconomic damage, underscoring Asia’s vulnerability to climate change. At the same time, as Asia emerged as the largest contributor to global carbon emissions, high-emitting countries in the region faced growing international pressure to abate emissions and avoid repeating the high-pollution development trajectories taken by earlier industrialised regions.\n \nConsequently, most Asian countries have articulated climate commitments through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and net-zero pledges, and have established a range of policies to support these climate targets and facilitate the transition to low-carbon economies. They have also repeatedly updated the emissions reduction targets and policies to make them more ambitious. However, implementation gaps, defined as the divergence between a country’s target emissions and the actual emissions under current policies, remain prevalent across the region. Despite increasingly ambitious commitments, the translation of pledges into tangible progress has often been slow. Shortcomings in legislative action, policy enforcement, technology deployment, and financial investment have limited actual emissions reductions, resulting in outcomes that fall short of NDC targets or even increases in emissions.\n \nGiven that many Asian countries are emerging or developing economies, concerns over economic growth constitute the primary driver of the implementation gap and a major obstacle to the low-carbon transition, alongside other constraints, such as limited technological and institutional capacity, political conflicts, and policy instability. That is, governments may be reluctant to adopt more stringent low-carbon policies, as they fear that economy-wide, fundamental and rapid transitions would threaten their fossil fuel-based economic structure and cause considerable economic losses. However, the continued expansion of carbon-intensive infrastructure creates long-term carbon lock-in, whereby increasing dependence on high-emission technologies makes future transitions significantly more costly. Besides, recent regulatory trends in global trade, such as the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) and emissions standards, indicate that carbon-intensive export-oriented economies may face declining competitiveness in international markets. Thus, Asian countries are required to reduce the carbon emissions of their products to maintain market access and attract investment. Furthermore, a low-carbon transition could contribute to lowering macroeconomic risks for some Asian countries susceptible to price volatility in imported fossil fuels by enhancing energy security. Low-carbon energy sources, particularly renewable energy, offer a more stable and domestically available alternative, thereby reducing dependence on imports and stabilising energy prices.\n \nIn conclusion, a low-carbon transition is essential to achieving a sustainable economy in Asia, as it could enable continued growth while mitigating climate-related risks and strengthening energy security. For Asian countries, the transition to low-carbon development represents not only an environmental imperative but also a strategic pathway to ensure long-term economic resilience and sustainability. Therefore, governments are expected to assess the current implementation gaps and improve or redesign low-carbon policies to make them more ambitious and deliver more effective decarbonisation outcomes.\n \nAgainst this backdrop, this session will take a deep dive into Asian countries’ progress in the low-carbon transition. In particular, the session participants will discuss:\n \n(a) The gaps between current mitigation efforts and net-zero pathways;\n(b) The challenges that cause these gaps;\n(c) Low-carbon transition and sustainable economy (in terms of economic growth and energy security);\n(d) Internal and external factors influencing low-carbon transition;\n(e) Possible policies and regional and international cooperation to support Asian countries’ low-carbon transition.

This thematic panel will evaluate and demonstrate how personalised, behaviourally informed approaches can accelerate residential green energy adoption. It draws on experimental evidence generated as part of a 4-year research project in the Netherlands, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWA-ORC). Using large-scale surveys, discrete choice experiments, and systematic evidence reviews, the papers in this panel show that households are heterogeneous in their motivations, constraints, and behavioural biases. We present empirical segmentation of Dutch households using large nationally representative samples into four distinct behavioural phenotypes, evidence on how psychological frictions shape willingness to invest in energy retrofits, and a synthesis of clustering and machine-learning methods for targeting interventions. Together, the contributions demonstrate the policy value of tailoring retrofit programmes to behavioural profiles and offer methodological guidance for designing more effective, low-friction energy transition interventions. 

Environmental extreme events are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, posing profound challenges to economic activity, governance systems, and policy resilience. As climate change intensifies these shocks, governments and communities are compelled to rethink how they prepare for, respond to, and recover from environmental extremes in ways that are both efficient and equitable. This thematic session brings together five empirical studies that examine how societies respond to environmental extremes through changes in infrastructure investment, insurance coverage, labor and recreational behavior, and the adoption of green technologies. Collectively, the papers investigate the institutional, demographic, economic, and behavioral consequences of environmental shocks across diverse sectors and geographic contexts, offering insights toward more resilient and adaptive systems. 

This session examines the complex and increasingly urgent relationship between climate change and human mobility. Migration is increasingly recognized as a fundamental adaptation strategy, theoretically allowing the global economy to buffer climate shocks by reallocating labor from vulnerable to resilient regions. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism is often constrained by significant barriers to mobility, and we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the complex interactions between migration, climate policy, and the broader welfare impacts on vulnerable populations

In an open world economy, climate policy is inseparable from international capital markets. Capital flows, financial risk sharing, debt positions, and interest rates shape the effectiveness of mitigation policies, how their costs are distributed across countries and generations, and how policies spill over internationally. Yet, climate policy is often analysed as a largely domestic problem of how to set a carbon price, reduce emissions, and manage the local costs. Our session will demonstrate how ignoring international capital markets leads to an incomplete analysis of the economics and the politics of climate policy.\n \nThe session brings together four papers that analyse climate policy through the lens of international capital markets. Bénassy-Quéré, Schubert, and Torres show how unilateral carbon pricing generates spillovers that are transmitted not only through trade but also through capital flows, with financial adjustment partly o􀆯setting adverse trade effects. Hillebrand and Epp emphasise how international financial markets enable risk sharing under climate uncertainty and how the degree of capital-market integration shapes optimal climate policy under cooperation and non-cooperation. Sahuc, Smets, and Vermandel show that climate mitigation affects inflation, interest rates, and monetary policy, linking carbon pricing to macro-financial conditions that influence investment and capital flows. Rezai and van der Ploeg analyse unilateral climate policy in small open economies and show how international asset positions, capital flows, and public debt shape macroeconomic adjustment and political support for emissions reductions.\n \nTaken together, the papers presented in this session show that international capital markets are a central transmission channel for climate policy: they mediate international spillovers, enable risk sharing, interact with monetary policy, and shape the distributional and political feasibility of mitigation. Below we list further details the papers of the session.

The Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) marks the start of a new assessment cycle at a time of intensifying climate impacts and rising expectations for effective climate action. As this process unfolds, the IPCC faces the challenge of keeping climate science policy-relevant and decision-oriented while responding to evolving societal needs, without compromising its core principles of scientific rigor and neutrality in an increasingly complex global context.\n \nThe proposed session, “The IPCC 7th Assessment Report: new journey, new challenges”, aims to discuss the evolving role of the IPCC in this rapidly changing scientific, political, and economic landscape. The session will focus on key innovations and challenges of the IPCC AR7 cycle, including advances in climate science, the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge, science–policy interactions, and the implications of the AR7 process for policymaking and private-sector decisionmaking.

Biological invasions are among the most pervasive forms of ecological and economic externalities, transforming ecosystems, altering production possibilities, and reshaping welfare outcomes. For environmental and resource economists, they raise fundamental questions about efficiency, equity, and optimal management under uncertainty. While much attention has been devoted to the damages they cause, a growing number of invasions blur the traditional line between harmful and beneficial species. From supporting livelihoods and food production to contributing to ecosystem services, these multi-role invasive species challenge conventional management frameworks and call for new economic tools to navigate trade-offs between ecological risks and socioeconomic gains. The session situates the economics of invasions as a frontier in understanding ecological change and societal adaptation, highlighting how economic theory, valuation, and policy design can improve decision-making under uncertainty and contribute to sustainable management of coupled socio-ecological systems. 

This session will discuss the role of rigorous policy design in evaluating solutions for different pressing environmental challenges in Latin America. Latin America, a diverse region with nearly 650 million inhabitants, is characterized for its diverse population, ecosystems, and environmental and energy policies. Despite its diversity, the region faces several common environmental and climate change challenges, e.g. rapid increase in renewable energy investments, disproportionate climate vulnerability among population with limited adaptation capacities, and lack of institutional capacity. This proposed session will present evidence from four Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, and will cover several pressing climate change and energy issues in Latin America. Drawing examples from their research, the four panelists will discuss how the careful design of policies matters to address some of these issues. Helo Sarmiento will discuss the importance of health policy addressing climate change-driven increases in morbidity and mortality, Araujo will discuss different policies to address deforestation in Latin America, Jordan will discuss the role of different institutions among rural households facing climate change, and Aguilar-Garcia will discuss the health impacts of air quality regulation in Latin America. 

The masterclass will start at 13:15. Please eat lunch before coming to the masterclass.\n\nThis masterclass aims at young researchers/PhD students. It introduces Machine Learning and discusses how it differs from and complements traditional econometrics. Benefits and drawbacks of various ML methods are illustrated with various economic applications using Python and time series and panel data.