Massimo Tavoni

• PhD
• Professor at Politecnico di Milano

Climate change mitigation requires urgent policy action from high-income economies, yet its sociopolitical feasibility depends heavily on public support. Drawing on a survey from 13 European countries, we identify Six Faces of climate policy support across two dimensions: overall support and preference stability. We identify the largest group of pe...

Risk assessments of complex systems are often supported by quantitative models. The sophistication of these models and the presence of various uncertainties call for systematic robustness and sensitivity analyses. The multivariate nature of their response challenges the use of traditional approaches. We propose a structured methodology to perform u...

Reaching net-zero carbon emissions requires large shares of intermittent renewable energy and the electrification of end-use consumption, such as heating, making the future energy system highly dependent on weather variability and climate change. Weather exhibits fluctuations on temporal scales ranging from sub-hourly to yearly while climate variat...

Climate change and inequality are critical and interrelated issues. Despite growing empirical evidence on the distributional implications of climate policies and climate risks, mainstream model-based assessments are often silent on the interplay between climate change and economic inequality. Here we fill this gap through an ensemble of eight large...

Climate stabilization requires the mobilization of substantial investments in low- and zero-carbon technologies, especially in emerging and developing economies. However, access to stable and affordable finance varies dramatically across countries. Models used to evaluate the energy transition do not differentiate regional financing costs and there...

Although the case for a swift climate transition is clear, its macro-financial viability remains uncertain. To shed light on the macroeconomic and financial response to deep mitigation trajectories controlled by carbon pricing, we integrate a process-based integrated assessment model into a macroeconomic agent-based model. The hybrid framework allo...

Understanding the dynamics and evolution of climate change and associated uncertainties is key for designing robust policy actions. Computer models are key tools in this scientific effort, which have now reached a high level of sophistication and complexity. Model auditing is needed in order to better understand their results, and to deal with the...

Air pollution is Europe's foremost environmental health threat, as highlighted by the European Environmental Agency. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the serious implications of air pollution and its potential to exacerbate diseases, including COVID-19, which could increase mortality rates. Both air pollution and COVID-19 disproportionately af...

Concerns have been raised against using carbon pricing for fighting climate change, as these might disproportionally affect lower-income households and thus increase inequality. However, the distributional implications of climate policies will depend on policy design and their capacity to reduce climate change impacts. To quantify the interaction b...

Climate change and inequality are critical and interrelated defining issues for this century. Despite growing empirical evidence on the economic incidence of climate policies and impacts, mainstream model-based assessments are often silent on the interplay between climate change and economic inequality. For example, all the major model comparisons...

Ecosystems generate a wide range of benefits for humans, including some market goods as well as other benefits that are not directly reflected in market activity¹. Climate change will alter the distribution of ecosystems around the world and change the flow of these benefits2,3. However, the specific implications of ecosystem changes for human welf...

Negative emissions technologies are attracting the interest of investors in the race to make them effective and profitable. When deployed at scale, they will be financed through public funds, reducing the fiscal space for a socially inclusive climate transition. Moreover, if the private sector owns negative emissions technologies, potentially large...

Geoengineering, including solar radiation management (SRM), has received increasing scrutiny due to the rise of climate extremes and slow progress in mitigating global carbon emissions. This climate policy option, even as a possibility, can have consequential implications for international climate governance. Here, we study how solar engineering af...

It is well documented that people have misperceptions about energy costs. However, there is mixed empirical evidence about the effectiveness of information provision and its persistence over time. Understanding the interplay between information regarding the private and social benefits of low-carbon technologies and identifying mechanisms through w...

As the economy and technology continue to advance, the need of energy for humans’ activities is growing, placing significant pressure on power distribution to reach this demand instantly. Household energy behaviors can be tracked by using Smart Meters (SM), whose data undoubtedly contains valuable insights into household electricity consumption. Ho...

Mindfulness practices have the potential to induce the cognitive and behavioral changes needed to foster pro-environmental behavior and increase support toward sustainable and climate-oriented policies. However, the empirical evidence of the effectiveness of meditation on sustainable behavior is limited and mostly confined to correlational studies,...

Climate stabilization requires the deployment of several low-carbon options, some of which are still not available at large scale or are too costly. Governments will have to make important decisions on how to incentivize Research and Development (R&D). Yet, current assessments of climate neutrality typically do not include research-driven innovatio...

Given concerns about the ambition and effectiveness of current climate policies, a case has been made for the combination of demand side policies such as carbon pricing with supply side bans on fossil fuel extraction. However, little is known about their interplay in the context of climate stabilization strategies. Here, we present a multi-model as...

Computational social science can help advance climate policy and help solve the climate crises. To do so, several steps need to be overcome to make the best use of the wealth of data and variety of models available to evaluate climate change policies. Here, we review the state of the art of numerical modelling and data science methods applied to po...

In the Glasgow COP26, several major economies have announced new neutrality commitments. Others revised their National determined contributions (NDC). The climate, energy, and economic repercussion of these revised pledges is unclear and depends on what other nations will do. Here, we analyze the impact of the Glasgow net-zero commitments on future...

Loss and damages is a key topic in international negotiations, but computing the financial claims associated with climate risks is complex. We show that climate-economic impact functions can be used to estimate the size of loss and damages. A fund equalizing climate risks and responsibilities is estimated at 380 USD Billion/yr by 2025, rising over...

Mitigation option are not yet being implemented at the scale required to limit global warming to well below 2°C. Various factors have been identified that inhibit the implementation of specific mitigation options. Yet, an integrated assessment of key barriers and enablers is lacking. Here we present a comprehensive framework to assess which factors...

Plain Language Summary Traditionally, computer models are used to study the timing and magnitude of greenhouse gases emissions reduction, adopting an economic perspective. Yet, some well‐known major issues affect such analyses. First, the decisions need to be taken in an uncertain context, that is, without exact knowledge about the future evolution...

Negative emission technologies are attracting the interest of investors in the race to make them effective and profitable. When deployed at scale, negative emissions will need to be financed through carbon tax revenues or issuing other taxes. Financing negative emissions could thus reduce the fiscal resources needed for a socially inclusive transit...

Cost-benefit integrated assessment models generate welfare-maximizing mitigation pathways under a set of assumptions to deal with deep uncertainty in future scenarios. These assumptions include socio-economic projections, the magnitude and dynamics of climate impacts on the economy, and physical climate response. As models explore the uncertainty s...

As they gain new users, climate change mitigation scenarios are playing an increasing role in transitions to net zero. One promising practice is the analysis of scenario ensembles. Here we argue that this practice has the potential to bring new and more robust insights compared with the use of single scenarios. However, several important aspects ha...

International migration is closely tied to demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors and their interaction with migration policies. Using a combination of a gravity econometric model and an overlapping generations model, we estimate the probability of bilateral migration among 160 countries in the period of 1960 to 2000 and use these fi...

Energy-efficiency classes provide coarse but easy-to-process information designed to help complex decisions. However, they are multi-attribute indices, imprecisely related to the running costs of graded products. Here we evaluate the impact of adding simple but accurate yearly or lifetime energy cost information to the European Union energy label....

One of the challenges in managing the Earth’s common pool resources, such as a livable climate or the supply of safe drinking water, is to motivate successive generations to make the costly effort not to deplete them. In the context of sequential contributions, intergenerational reciprocity dynamically amplifies low past efforts by decreasing succe...

This study investigates the effect of two interventions aimed at reducing electricity consumption among branches of a large Italian bank. The first intervention consists in the technological renovation of 70 branch buildings through the installation of an automated energy management system. The second is an energy-saving competition that involved m...

International migration is closely tied to demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors and their interaction with migration policies. Using a combination of a gravity econometric model and an overlapping generations model, we estimate the probability of bilateral migration among 160 countries in the period of 1960 to 2000 and use these fi...

This study investigates the effect of two interventions aimed at reducing electricity consumption among branches of a large Italian bank. The first intervention consists in the technological renovation of 70 branch buildings through the installation of an automated energy management system. The second is an energy-saving competition that involved m...

Climate stabilization pathways reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change depict the transformation challenges and opportunities of a low carbon world. The scenarios provide information about the transition, including its economic repercussions. However, these calculations do not account for the economic benefits of lowering global t...

Decarbonsing the building sector depends on choices made at the household level, which are heterogeneous. Agent-based models are tools used to describe heterogeneous choices but require data-intensive calibration. This study analyses a novel, cross-country European household-level survey, including socio-demographic characteristics, energy-saving h...

Background Climate change and air pollution are two major societal problems. Their complex interplay calls for an advanced evaluation framework that can support decision making. Previous assessments have looked at the co-benefits of climate policies for air pollution, but few have optimised air pollution benefits. In our study, we lay out a modelli...

Mitigation pathways exploring end-of-century temperature targets often entail temperature overshoot. Little is known about the additional climate risks generated by overshooting temperature. Here we assessed the benefits of limiting overshoot. We computed the probabilistic impacts for different warming targets and overshoot levels on the basis of a...

Global emissions scenarios play a critical role in the assessment of strategies to mitigate climate change. The current scenarios, however, are criticized because they feature strategies with pronounced overshoot of the global temperature goal, requiring a long-term repair phase to draw temperatures down again through net-negative emissions. Some i...

What are the benefits and drawbacks, and for whom?.

Estimates of economic implications of climate policy are important inputs into policy-making. Despite care to contextualize quantitative assessments of mitigation costs, one strong view outside academic climate economics is that achieving Paris Agreement goals implies sizable macroeconomic losses. Here, we argue that this notion results from unwarr...

Closing the emissions gap between Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the global emissions levels needed to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate goals will require a comprehensive package of policy measures. National and sectoral policies can help fill the gap, but success stories in one country cannot be automatically replicated in oth...

Given concerns about the ambition and effectiveness of current climate pledges, a case has been made for the integration of demand-side policies such as carbon pricing with supply-side bans on fossil fuel extraction. However, little is known about their interplay in the context of climate stabilization. Here, we present the first multi-model assess...

Given concerns about the ambition and effectiveness of current climate pledges, a case has been made for the integration of demand-side policies such as carbon pricing with supply-side bans on fossil fuel extraction. However, little is known about their interplay in the context of climate stabilization strategies. Here, we present the first multi-m...

Building codes are an effective policy instrument to reduce energy consumption, but their impact depends on local building construction, renovation and demolition cycles, affected by economic and demographic development. In this research a unique global building stock model, with country level detail, is developed to understand the impact of buildi...

The Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have a key role to play in understanding which factors and policies would motivate, encourage and enable different actors to adopt a wide range of sustainable energy behaviours and support the required system changes and policies. The SSH can provide critical insights into how consumers could be empowered to...

Benefit-cost analyses of climate policies by integrated assessment models have generated conflicting assessments. Two critical issues affecting social welfare are regional heterogeneity and inequality. These have only partly been accounted for in existing frameworks. Here, we present a benefit-cost model with more than 50 regions, calibrated upon e...

COVID-19 lockdowns make it possible to investigate the extent to which an unprecedented increase in renewables' penetration may have brought unexpected limitations and vulnerabilities of current power systems to the surface. We empirically investigate how power systems in five European countries have dealt with this unexpected shock, drastically ch...

Long-term mitigation scenarios developed by integrated assessment models underpin major aspects of recent IPCC reports and have been critical to identify the system transformations that are required to meet stringent climate goals. However, they have been criticized for proposing pathways that may prove challenging to implement in the real world an...

Estimates of climate change’s economic impacts vary widely, depending on the applied methodology. This uncertainty is a barrier for policymakers seeking to quantify the benefits of mitigation. In this Perspective, we provide a comprehensive overview and categorization of the pathways and methods translating biophysical impacts into economic damages...

Though nudges are gaining attention as complements to financial incentives, evidence of the interplay between these two policy instruments is lacking. Here, we discuss and evaluate how combinations of financial policies and nudges affect behaviors. Through a framed online experiment, we assess the effect of combining financial incentives (monetary...

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies are promising but speculative. Their prospect as an affordable negative emissions option that can be deployed in large scale is particularly uncertain. Here, we report the results of an expert elicitation about the evolution of techno-economic factors characterizing DAC over time and across climate scenarios. T...

Change in the air The 2016 Paris Agreement set the ambitious goals of keeping global temperature rise this century below 2°C, or even better, 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. Substantial interventions are required to meet these goals, particularly for industrialized countries. Duan et al. projected that China will need to reduce its carbon emissio...

With intensifying climate change impacts, there is a risk that economic resources needed to adapt to the rising damages are diverted away from emission reduction, jeopardizing the chances of stabilizing temperature within safe levels. Indeed, the traditional static single-objective formulation leads to a conflict between mitigation and adaptation,...

Social information programs are widely used to nudge behavioural change. Their effec-tiveness strongly depends on household and individual traits. The existing evidence in economics and psychology points to the role of environmental values and identity in de-termining pro-environmental behavior and the impact of social information. In a large field...

Evaluating the reduction in pollution caused by a sudden change in emissions is complicated by the confounding effect of weather variations. We propose an approach based on machine learning to build counterfactual scenarios that address the effect of weather and apply it to the COVID-19 lockdown of Lombardy, Italy. We show that the lockdown reduced...

Which policies can increase the resilience of the financial system to climate risks? Recent evidence on the significant impacts of climate change and natural disasters on firms, banks and other financial institutions call for a prompt policy response. In this paper, we employ a macro-financial agentbased model to study the interaction between clima...

We evaluate the impact of adding simple, accurate information to energy labels on consumers’ purchases through a large-scale field experiment with an online retailer of energy-using durables. In addition to the energy efficiency grades and energy usage information included in the standard EU labelling, we provide energy cost information at differen...

Climate change affects human and natural systems unevenly. Solving it, by reducing greenhouse gases and adapting to climate impacts, will also be felt differently depending on levels of income and other dimensions of inequality. This leads us to ask: have the widely used integrated assessment models accommodated inequality considerations sufficient...

Smart meters can help citizens in optimizing energy consumption patterns. However, mixed evidence exists on their effectiveness in reducing energy demand and especially in levelling off the daily peaks of electricity load curves. Here, we evaluate the impact of providing real-time feedback on electricity consumption from a field trial in Italy. We...

The COVID-19 pandemic, lock-down restrictions and other measures that have been put in place have potentially far reaching implications for inequality within and between countries, for energy demand in different sectors, and for structural change and economic growth. These factors are highly relevant for climate action. In response to the COVID-19...

Global emissions scenarios play a critical role in the assessment of strategies to mitigate climate change and their related societal transformations. The current generation of scenarios, however, are criticized because they rely heavily on net negative CO2 emissions (NNCE) that result from allowing temperature limits to be temporarily exceeded. In...

Closing the remaining emissions gap between Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the global emissions levels needed to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate goals will likely require a comprehensive package of policy measures. National and sectoral policies can help fill the gap, but success stories in one country cannot be automatically...

Behavioural interventions that leverage social norms are widely used to foster energy conservation. For instance, home energy reports combine information on others’ behaviour (descriptive feedback) and approval for norm compliant behaviour (injunctive feedback). In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated how descriptive and injunctive feedba...

Households reduced their electricity use the most when they learnt both that they were using more energy than their neighbours and that energy conservation was socially approved. This suggests that efforts to use social information to nudge conservation should combine different types of social feedback to maximize impact. The content of social info...

The Finite Pool of Worry (FPW) hypothesis states that humans have finite emotional resources for worry, so that when we become more worried about one threat, it can decrease worry about other threats. Despite its relevance, no conclusive empirical evidence for the hypothesis exists. We leverage the sudden onset of new worries introduced by the COVI...

The harsh lockdown measures that marked the response to the COVID-19 outbreak in the Italian region of Lombardy provides a unique natural experiment for assessing the sensitivity of local air pollution to emissions. However, evaluating the pollution benefits of the lockdown is complicated by confounding factors such as variations in weather. We use...

Climate change will impact economic growth and exacerbate global income inequalities. By hitting the poorest more, both in Italy, Europe and worldwide, it poses a challenge for the international order. Here we discuss the latest analysis of the economic impacts of climate change.