Valeria Jana Schwanitz

• PhD in Economics, Diplom/Master in Physics, Diplom/Master in Economics
• Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

Integrated Assessment Models of global climate change (IAMs) are an established tool to study interlinkages between the human and the natural system. Insights from these complex models are widely used to advise policy-makers and to inform the general public. But up to now there has been little understanding of how these models can be evaluated and...

Abstract Data available from the recent boom in European offshore wind investments contradict widely held expectations about a decline in costs per kW. Our review shows that scenario projections for investment costs are systematically flawed by over-optimistic assumptions. Contrasting offshore wind technology with onshore wind and nuclear power, we...

This paper presents a set of energy and resource intensive scenarios based on the concept of Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs). The scenario family is characterized by rapid and fossil-fueled development with high socio-economic challenges to mitigation and low socio-economic challenges to adaptation (SSP5). A special focus is placed on the SSP...

Statistical accounting of the impacts of citizen-led energy initiatives is absent, despite their impact on increased energy self-sufficiency and ramping up of renewable energies, local sustainable development, greater citizen engagement, diversification of activities, social innovation, and acceptance of transition measures. This paper quantifies t...

This paper examines the emergence of 1072 solar initiatives (268 associations and 804 cooperatives operating photovoltaic systems) from 2006 to 2018 in Germany. The study draws on organizational ecology theory to identify factors that influence the likelihood of establishing a solar initiative by investigating the impacts of two opposing effects: l...

Energy communities (ECs) are emerging as vital contributors to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, despite being unnoticed. This article is the first to comprehensively discuss and quantify European citizen-led energy initiatives' contributions to SDGs 7 (ensure access to affordable and clean energy), 9 (fostering industry, innovatio...

Submitted to peer review. Abstract: We scrutinize widely-used, distinct methods to set city-level climate goals: Deadline 2020, One Planet City Challenge, and Tyndall Local Carbon Budget Tool. Through meticulous verification and validation of data input, calculation processes, and documentation, the exercise assesses whether the methods are fit-fo...

Numerous case studies show that citizens engage in various ways in renewable and low carbon energy projects, thereby contributing to the sustainable energy transition. To date, however, a systematic and cross-country database on citizen-led initiatives and projects is lacking. By performing a major compilation and reviewing copious data sources fro...

The digitalization of the energy sector is in progress, but Europe is about to fall behind. A human-centered design approach ensures that it takes place with, and for the benefit of, people, for which this letter puts forward policy recommendations. People need access to tailored and ready-for-use tools that help the realization of societal co-bene...

Energy markets have opened up to new actors and business models. We perform an empirical investigation of energy cooperatives (EC) investing in the photo-voltaic (PV) market. Deploying a unique database for Germany with 584 EC covering two decades of activities, we provide statistical evidence on their businesses, members and customer segments, pro...

Statistical accounting of the impacts of citizen-led energy initiatives is absent. This paper quantifies the aggregate contributions of collective action in pursuit of the sustainable energy transition in Europe. We estimate the number of initiatives (10,540), projects (22,830), people involved (2,010,600), installed renewable capacities (7.2-9.9 G...

We confront empirical data on citizen-led renewable energy capacities in Poland with results obtained from a meta-theoretical, empirical analysis of the national energy system. We elicit and rank essential disabling and enabling factors that explain the current low level of citizen energy in Poland. Altogether, we estimate the contributions of indi...

With the continued digitization of the energy sector, the problem of sunken scholarly data investments and forgone opportunities of harvesting existing data is exacerbating. It compounds the problem that the reproduction of knowledge is incomplete, impeding the transparency of sciencebased targets for the choices made in the energy transition. The...

With the continued digitization of the energy sector, the problem of sunken scholarly data investments and forgone opportunities of harvesting existing data is exacerbating. It adds to the problem that the reproduction of knowledge is incomplete, impeding the transparency of science-based evidence for the choices made in the energy transition. We c...

The principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) have been put forward to guide optimal sharing of data. The potential for industrial and social innovation is vast. Domain-specific metadata standards are crucial in this context, but are widely missing in the energy sector. This report provides a collaborative r...

Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change are an established tool to explore possible pathways of climate change mitigation and adaptation. The models are a quantitative backbone for IPCC reports. But can the models be trusted? This manuscript discusses how the models can be scrutinized and where limits to model validation exist.

We present preliminary estimates for the contribution of collective prosumers to the energy transition across Europe. Drawing from the COMETS inventory, we report country-level and EU-level aggregates for current total numbers of initiatives and their historic evolution, the fields of engagement, the number of people involved, renewable capacities...

Process-based integrated assessment models (IAMs) project long-term transformation pathways in energy and land-use systems under what-if assumptions. IAM evaluation is necessary to improve the models’ usefulness as scientific tools applicable in the complex and contested domain of climate change mitigation. We contribute the first comprehensive syn...

Energy communities (EC) are among the new actors in the energy market, playing an important role in the uptake of photovoltaics (PV) in European markets. This paper estimates their aggregate contribution to the low-carbon energy transition in terms of installed capacities for PV and evaluates their economic performance comparing with market prices....

The transition towards sustainability has been prominently put on the global agenda when in 2015, the Member States of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Among the 17 goals, SDG 7 targets the provision of "Clean energy for all." This chapter critically reflects on the sustainable energy transition and its relati...

Broad acceptance by and support from the society for the sustainable energy transition is indispensable. Public participation and ownership-in particular through collective action initiatives-is seen as a means to foster this support. Starting with the origin of the cooperative model, we present how it has been evolving until today. We then discuss...

This conceptual paper applies a mobilization model to Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector. The goal is to synthesize aspects of sustainable transition theories with social movement theory to gain insights into how CAIs mobilize to bring about niche-regime change in the context of the sustainable energy transition. First, we de...

The moral imperatives of sustainable development

The share of renewable energy is increasing throughout Europe. Yet, little is known about how much can be attributed to different actors, other than those commercially active. This paper provides empirical evidence of activities by energy cooperatives in the field of renewable energy in four different European countries. It draws from a database co...

The drive to expand renewable energies is often in direct conflict with sustainable development goals. Thus, it is important that energy policies account for potential trade-offs. We assess the interlinkages between energy, food, water and land, for two case studies, Okinawa and Sogn og Fjordane. We apply a range of assessment methods and study the...

The chapter is the introduction to our latest book: "The Imperatives of Sustainable Development: Needs, Justice, Limits" (Routledge, 2017). The book is available at https://www.routledge.com/sustainability

Thirty years ago, the UN report Our Common Future placed sustainable development firmly on the international agenda. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development takes the ethical foundations of Our Common Future and builds a model that emphasizes three equally important moral imperatives – satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respect...

Global GDP projections for the 21st century are needed for the exploration of long-term global environmental problems, in particular climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions as well as climate change mitigation and adaption capacities strongly depend on growth of per capita income. However, long-term economic projections are highly uncertain. This...

It is often argued that fossil fuel subsidies hamper the transition towards a sustainable energy supply as they incentivize wasteful consumption. We assess implications of a subsidy phase-out for the mitigation of climate change and the low-carbon transformation of the energy system, using the global energy–economy model REMIND. We compare our resu...

Integrated assessments of how climate policy interacts with energy-economy systems can be performed by a variety of models with different functional structures. In order to provide insights into why results differ between models, this article proposes a diagnostic scheme that can be applied to a wide range of models. Diagnostics can uncover pattern...

Fragmented climate policies across parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change have led to the question of whether initiating significant and immediate climate change mitigation can support the achievement of other non-climate objectives. We analyze such potential co-benefits in connection with a range of mitigation efforts using resu...

As a global climate agreement has not yet been achieved, a variety of national climate policy agendas are being pursued in different parts of the world. Regionally fragmented climate policy regimes are prone to carbon leakage between regions, which has given rise to concerns about the environmental effectiveness of this approach. This study investi...

This study explores a situation of staged accession to a global climate policy regime from the current situation of regionally fragmented and moderate climate action. The analysis is based on scenarios in which a front runner coalition – the EU or the EU and China – embarks on immediate ambitious climate action while the rest of the world makes a t...

This document describes the REMIND model in its version 1.5. REMIND is an integrated assessment model of the energy-economy-climate system. REMIND stands for “Regional Model of Investments and Development.”

Green technological progress bears a strong potential to alleviate climate change, but its utilization is contingent on factors which are by nature impossible to anticipate or predict. Developing stochastic optimisation models, we explore how the decision to invest in research and development towards greener technologies is influenced by environmen...

This paper contains the status quo of environmental ODA to Cambodia with focus on a comparison of EU and Japanese strategies and implementation procedures. Various documents and strategy papers of Cambodia, major donors and stakeholders in Cambodia are surveyed; data collection and cross-check of data from different sources has been carried out. Th...

Recently, the study of low frequency modes in dusty plasmas has attracted much attention. Because of the high charge of the macro-particles, interaction effects play a dominant role, leading to a solid-like state with long range order. Under these conditions, dust lattice waves (DLW) are expected to occur as excitations of the ordered crystal-like...

This chapter proposes an expression for the dynamical structure factor, which accounts for collisions and is based on generalized linear response theory. For high values of the coupling parameter, dust grains in a dusty plasma exhibit a solid-state like structure with long range order. Whereas for small values of coupling parameter, a perturbative...