Sabbatical Johan Eyckmans: Integrated climate and circular economy

My current research work consists of two main tracks: (1) economics of climate change (in particular integrated assessment modeling and international environmental agreements, see Bakalova and Eyckmans 2019) and (2) economic analysis of circular economy (in particular economic modeling of material flows, see García-Barragán, J.F., Eyckmans, J. and Rousseau, S. 2019). So far these two tracks were rather separate but during the last couple of years, it has become clear that a more circular economy can be an important contributor to climate change mitigation because the production of steel, cement, chemicals etc constitute up to 15% of global CO2 emissions according to IEA (2018). In the literature so far, few attempts have been made to incorporate circular economy strategies (re-use, remanufacturing, recycling, longer life time of products, …) into the traditional integrated assessment (IA) models (see the seminal DICE and RICE model of 2018 Nobel Prize laureate William Nordhaus). It is my ambition during my sabbatical to explore the possibilities for extending the existing IA model in my research group (see Bakalova & Eyckmans 2020) with stylized material flow accounts and CE strategies like recycling, re-use, life time extension etc. This should lead to new project proposals to apply for research money to achieve this goal. In addition, I plan two short research stays abroad. The first is with Prof Michael Finus of University of Graz with whom I have published several papers before. Our plan is to extract an additional paper out of the work of my former PhD student Irina Bakalova. A second research stay is with Prof Samuel Fankhauser at the Grantham Institute at London School of Economics. Together with Prof Snorre Kverndokk of the Frisch Institute in Oslo, we are planning an extension of our 2015 paper on climate finance during a joint visit to LSE.