2011•04•21 Maastricht
While innovation policy represents a powerful toolbox for mitigating climate change, to be effective it has to coherently target a range of issues including resource scarcity, demographic change and rising global affluence.
This is the message of a new report — “Analysis of Innovation Drivers and Barriers in Support of Better Policies: Economic and Market Intelligence on Innovation” —- produced by UNU-MERIT for Directorate General for Enterprise (DG-Enterprise) of the European Commission.
The first aim of climate policy is to prevent dangerous levels of global warming linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In the EU, CO2 from energy sources accounts for over three quarters of all greenhouse gas emissions.
The report by UNU-MERIT researchers Anthony Arundel, Minna Kanerva and René Kemp identifies two paths for achieving mitigation benefits:
Pursuing these paths will require policy makers to exert pressure on carbon-based systems and to nurture alternatives.
The report, which draws on state-of-the-art in innovation studies and policy-led transitions, makes 12 interlinked recommendations. According to this plan, EU innovation policy for climate change should:
This report, the first in a series of six INNO-Grips (“Global Review of Innovation Policy Studies”) analyses, concludes that a continuous, coherent, forward-looking process of adaptive policy-making will be key to a successful energy transition. The further development of tools to analyse what capacities need to be built is therefore essential.