Rebound Mitigation — Environmental policy making in the context of rebound effects

Seminar with David Font Vivanco
Thursday, 19 July 2018, 1pm

Policymakers are increasingly concerned about the unsatisfactory outcomes of efforts to harmonise welfare with environmental quality. These efforts have often fallen short of expectations due to so-called rebound effects, namely behavioural and systemic responses to technical change leading to additional consumption and environmental impacts.

While the relevance of rebound effects is widely recognised, the best way to establish their actual size is the object of intense debate in the literature. it is thus difficult to assess to which extend environmental policy goals were not achieved due to rebound effects, and how future policies and policy mixes can be designed in ways that minimise the impact of rebound effects.

In this talk, David will introduce preliminary results of the Effective environmental policies in Europe in the context of rebound effects (EFFECT) project, which aims at developing an innovative analytical framework for capturing rebound effects that combines an interdisciplinary perspective with micro and macro-level aspects.

ABOUT

David Font Vivanco is a Research Associate and Marie Curie Fellow at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. His previous appointment was as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has a B.S. in Environmental Sciences and a M.Sc in Industrial Ecology by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a Ph.D in Industrial Ecology from Leiden University. He also has professional experience in the fields of industrial and municipal waste management and environmental economics.