In the context of the “dual carbon” strategy, how to leverage green finance to promote China's wind power industry is a hot topic. Unlike existing literature, this article uses a nonparametric additive model to investigate the impact and mechanism of green finance on wind power development. Research has found that green finance has an inverted U-shaped nonlinear impact on wind power development, indicating that green finance has a more prominent contribution to the wind power industry in the early stages. Further mechanism research indicates that green finance affects the wind power industry through foreign direct investment and green technology innovation. Specifically, with the relaxation of foreign direct investment conditions in the energy sector, the role of foreign direct investment in promoting the wind power industry more prominent in the later stages. In the early stages, government support was greater, and green technology patents grew rapidly, driving green technology innovation to have a more significant impact on the wind power industry. In addition, the impact of fiscal decentralization, wind power prices, and environmental regulations on the wind power industry also exhibits significant nonlinear characteristics. This article helps to comprehensively understand the mechanism and impact of green finance on wind power development, and provides a reliable basis for optimizing green finance policy and effectively promoting wind power.
This chapter addresses the sustainability features of non-fungible tokens (NFT) through Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria. Consistent with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ESGs represent best practice standards used by investors to screen and back sustainable projects. NFT applications raise sustainability concerns that need to be foreseen with social and technological forecasting to attract investors before their standards become consolidated and ubiquitous. This chapter considers the main ESG parameters of existing BigTechs that are concerned with NFT applications. The chapter also includes a SWOT analysis that is pertinent to the NFT space. The findings of the chapter suggest that, whereas the impact of the digital footprint of energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies can be softened by the technological upgrade, the strongest ESG issues in fact concern the social and governance component; For instance, ludopathies may be exacerbated by 3D dependence, detaching addicted surfers from the real world.
Many countries have implemented different carbon reduction policies to achieve carbon neutrality in the current century. As one of the popular policies, the cap-and-trade policy provides carbon emission quotas for power generation companies. Each company must carefully determine its energy production based on the carbon emission quota and renewable uncertainty. This paper analyzes the cooperation among different power generation companies using the coalitional game theory. Power generation companies can form a union to share the total carbon emission quotas to maximize their total profit. We show the optimality of the grand coalition by proving that the profit function is superadditive. This result highlights the benefits of cooperation. Besides, we propose a profit allocation mechanism that allocates the total profit to different power generation companies. Furthermore, we prove that the proposed profit allocation mechanism is in the core of the coalitional game such that no group of power generation companies has any incentives to leave the grand coalition. We design a smart contract to enable power generation companies to form a coalition. We further implement the smart contract on the Ethereum platform to validate its effectiveness. Numerical studies have been conducted to validate the established theoretical results.
Marco Schletz, Axel Constant, Angel Hsu, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx · 6 authors
The Regenerative Finance (ReFi) movement aims to fundamentally transform the governance of global common pool resources (CPRs), such as the atmosphere, which are being degraded despite international efforts. The ReFi movement seeks to achieve this by utilizing digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (D-MRV); tokenization of assets; and decentralized governance approaches. However, there is currently a lack of a clear path forward to create and implement models that actually drive the “Re-” in ReFi beyond perpetuating the existing extractive economics and toward actual regeneration. In addition, ReFi suffers from growing pains, lacking a common interoperability framework and definition for determining what a ReFi project is and how the individual components align toward the grand ambition. This paper provides a definition of the ReFi stack of interconnected components and examines how it can address limitations in climate change accounting, finance and markets, and governance. The authors also examine the theory of regenerative economics and CPRs to encourage further discussions and advancements in the ReFi space. The crucial question remains if and how ReFi can drive a change in paradigm toward the effective regeneration of global CPRs.
The green transformation of the manufacturing industry is related to the low-carbon and green development of the economy. The study explored the impact mechanism of the implementation of green finance policy on the green transformation of China’s manufacturing industry from 2013 to 2021 from three aspects of capital formation and incentive, credit catalysis, integration and decentralization, and conducted a quasi-natural experiment using difference-in-difference (DID) model. Research finds that: (1) The implementation of green finance significantly promotes the green transformation of China’s manufacturing industry and has good sustainability. The mechanisms of fund formation and orientation, credit catalysis, integration and decentralization are the primary mechanism of green finance to promote the green transformation of the manufacturing industry, and the implementation effect of green finance has apparent heterogeneity; (2) The promoting effect of green finance on the green transformation of the manufacturing industry is solely vast in state-owned industries however now not enormous in non-state-owned industries; (3) The influence of green finance on the green transformation efficiency of manufacturing industry with a better information environment is more significant than manufacturing industry with a worse information environment; (4) Faced with the pressure of investing in green industries, the coping strategies adopted by enterprises in different industries are quite different. The promoting effect of green finance on the green transformation of the manufacturing industry is significant in low-competition industries but insignificant in high-competition industries. This study has enriched the research on the effect of green finance policies, explored solutions based on quasi-nature, and provided policy references for the green transformation of the manufacturing industry.
Nicolás Malz, Felipe Corral Montoya, Paola Yanguas-Parra, Pao-Yu Oei
Juxtaposing China’s current situation and policies toward coal and renewables at home and abroad, we argue that China remains in a paradoxical state of carbon lock-in. We analyze the techno-economic, institutional and political factors that contribute to China’s coal-related policies following a novel approach that blends different theories and frameworks to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue between various strands of research that were hitherto unconnected. This is accomplished by applying a political economy framework through the lens of techno-institutional carbon lock-in theory in three case studies encompassing China itself, as well as China’s climate and energy policy abroad in Pakistan and Mozambique. The article draws four major conclusions about China’s energy paradox: 1) An imperative for economic growth lies at the heart of the Chinese governance system’s incentive structure, which has resulted in a coal-based energy and industrial policy. 2) China’s government should use the experimental, decentralized nature of its regionally-decentralized regime and energy sector to their advantage by promoting disruption rather than incumbency. 3) To address the structural and institutional deficiencies that maintain or even strengthen carbon lock-in, energy governance should be shaped around the primary challenge of strengthening renewable energy advocates throughout all levels of government. 4) The discussion of coal financing abroad must now go beyond the discontinuation of new projects; the building of alternative cleaner projects should be considered and the ones in progress should be halted.
Naielly Lopes Marques, Leonardo Lima Gomes, Luiz Eduardo Teixeira Brandão
ABSTRACT This article proposes an investment model for a renewable energy generator that allows it to earn the right to issue Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and sell them through quarterly sales auctions promoted by the blockchain. Blockchain technology can further promote the RECs market, as it enables tokenization and distribution of certificates. We did not find articles in the literature that analyze the decision to invest in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that have rules for issuing and trading RECs specified in smart contracts, which are executed and validated by the blockchain. This article contributes to the literature on blockchain technology applications in the renewable energy market by proposing issuing and selling RECs tokens through a DAO. The relevance of this research is that it shows that simple real option pricing methods can help decision-makers evaluate investment opportunities under uncertainty and flexibility. The tokenization and distribution of RECs via blockchain can promote transaction agility, reduce or eliminate bureaucracy in the means of payment, and increase the security and transparency of transactions. We propose a model for issuing and selling RECs in smart contracts. We assume that the generator has the flexibility to invest now or in one year to enter the platform, considering the energy generated in one year by a single typical 4MW wind turbine. Our model assumes that the price of the REC token follows an inverse demand function subject to stochastic shocks. The results contribute to the understanding of the performance dynamics of digital products under uncertainty and flexibility and show that distributed ledger technology (DLT) may be a viable alternative for renewable energy incentives.
Niccolò Bertuzzi, Federica Cittadino, Giada Giacomini, Alice Meier
Climate change represents a global problem and a challenge with manifold responses, which requires coordinated action at different levels. In this context, subnational governments play a significant – yet still understudied – role in the fight against climate change; they exercise powers in policy sectors that may have an impact on climate mitigation and adaptation objectives, such as transport, energy and water, and spatial planning. The research project “Climate change integration in the multilevel governance of Italy and Austria” (Research Südtirol/Alto Adige 2019) compares the Italian and Austrian legal systems with a particular focus on how climate change policy integration (CPI) is realized in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano and Trento in Italy and Länder Tyrol and Vorarlberg in Austria. The project hypothesizes that five factors play a particularly significant role in realizing CPI, namely coordination, participation, information, leadership and funding. In this contribution, we will focus on the dimension of coordination. Also in light of the different decentralization arrangements in Italy and Austria, coordination in the study areas analysed unfolds differently concerning both the type and the employed instruments of coordination, although certain common tendencies can also be observed. Drawing from the results of the empirical research (interviews) conducted in the study areas, this article argues that coordination is affected by the federal vs regional organization of the State only when it comes to vertical coordination. Furthermore, since climate change in not a unitary policy field, improving horizontal coordination among policy fields seems to be more crucial than improving vertical coordination.
Due to a lack of focus on China’s financial decentralization system, the existing research does not pay attention to the beneficial contribution of Chinese local governments to carbon emission reduction through their actions in the financial field. In this study, we collected 16 years of data from 30 provinces in China and utilized a two-way fixed-effects model to empirically test the impact of China’s financial decentralization on carbon emission reduction. The regression results show that China’s financial decentralization system has a significant carbon-emission reduction effect. A heterogeneity analysis shows that this effect is common in different regions of China and that fiscal decentralization will negatively moderate it. A mechanism analysis shows that under China’s financial decentralization system, the active intervention of local governments in local finance will significantly upgrade the energy consumption structure and ease the financing constraints of enterprises. The regression results of the spatial econometric model show that the carbon emission reduction effect of China’s financial decentralization still has a spatial spillover effect. Finally, we put forward corresponding policy recommendations.
Oscar Golding, Guangsheng Yu, Qinghua Lu, Xiwei Xu
Recent blockchain-based carbon markets focus on permit-based trading requiring manual application processes to grant the right for carbon emission. A decentralized blockchain-based carbon market without relying on off-chain permits is yet to be explored. In this paper, we present a new design of blockchain-based carbon trading through the introduction of Carboncoin – a blockchain asset which tokenizes the right of energy producers to emit carbon. Instead of relying on off-chain and centralized permits, producers are allowed to freely exchange Carboncoin with each other for fiat currency. By using an on-chain asset, carbon production can be automatically expensed whenever a producer records new energy production which is certified on the blockchain. Moreover, the proposed design enables generic ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) data to be used to provide a more holistic reputation score inclusive of ESG initiatives undertaken by market participants. We conclude that entirely blockchain-based carbon markets can be made more comprehensive using ESG data and on-chain assets, but at the cost of reduced performance.
Marco Schletz, Angel Hsu, Brendan R. Mapes, Martin Wainstein
The Paris Agreement’s decentralized and bottom-up approach to climate action poses an enormous accounting challenge by substantially increasing the number of heterogeneous national, sub-national, and non-state actors. Current legacy climate accounting systems and mechanisms are insufficient to avoid information asymmetry and double-counting due to actor heterogeneity and fragmentation. This paper presents a nested climate accounting architecture that integrates several innovative digital technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technology, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and concepts such as nested accounting and decentralized identifiers to improve interoperability across accounting systems. Such an architecture can enhance capacity building and technology transfer to the Global South by creating innovation groups, increasing scalability of accounting solutions that can lead to leapfrogging into innovative systems designs, and improving inclusiveness.
The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between supply, demand and price fundamentals of Ethereum. In the paper, daily data covering the period 20.05.2017-31.01.2019 was used. Hypotheses were explained using the Classical Unit Root and ARDL Test. Respectively, the supply of Ethereum is explained by the "Ethereum Energy Consumption Index" and the demand of Ethereum is explained by "Transaction Fee". As a control variable, "Hashrate" is included in the model. Hashrate also expresses a technology used. Ethereum price is considered in Ether/USD. First, stationarity of the variables was determined using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test. The long-term dynamics are characterized using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Test. As a result of the analysis, it was found that there is a long-term relationship between Ethereum's supply, demand, price, and Hashrate. Additionally, Ethereum price and Hashrate affect the supply of Ethereum positively in the long-term.
Abstract This article consists of a critical review of the conceptual scholarship on the governance of climate finance and includes an overview of the institutional arrangements and governance logics that provide climate finance. New decentralized, polycentric structures allow for climate finance to more effectively reach the sub‐ and non‐state actors most directly implementing climate change governance. However, the expansion of climate finance into market‐inflected forms of blended finance, as well as debt‐based financing, express a neoliberal logic that shifts power to market actors. This may challenge the efficacy of climate finance. We suggest that further research is needed on polycentric systems in climate finance, since an apparent expansion in the diversity of providers is also accompanied by a counter‐intuitive concentration of decision‐making power with financial fund managers. We join others in suggesting that the weight of scholarship advocates for a strong return to public authored finance and governance, under the auspices of Green New Deal programs and more widely. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance