Joint CEPR Sustainable Finance RPN & SAFE Conference on Carbon Emission Pledges and Corporate Decarbonization Initiatives

On Wednesday, 27 September 2023, CEPR Research and Policy Network (RPN) on Sustainable Finance and Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE organised a one-day in-person Workshop on Carbon Emission Pledges and Corporate Decarbonization Initiatives at the House of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt. 

With major decarbonization efforts in several key sectors of the European economies underway, including power generation and transportation, policymakers and analysts are increasingly concerned about so-called hard-to-decarbonize industries, e.g., steel, cement and chemical production. Collectively, these manufacturing sectors account for around 25-30 % of total carbon dioxide emissions. Many of the underlying production technologies currently entail intrinsic process emissions that do not originate from the combustion of fossil fuels. Comprehensive decarbonization in these industries will therefore require the adoption of new production processes and products.

This conference brought together researchers, policymakers and practitioners in order to shed light on the most cost-effective pathways for decarbonization in these industries. A central question concerns the abatement cost curve for different hard-to-decarbonize industries. Such analysis should be informative to policymakers and corporate decision-makers in order to gauge the financial incentives and the intelligent regulation that will be required for comprehensive decarbonization.

Speakers: 

• Maria de Kleijn (Kearney)
• Martha Amram (Glynt AI) 
• Tassilo Boehm (Deloitte) 
• Alexis Garbade-Jones (Deloitte) 
• Gunther Glenk (Harvard Business School)
• Michael Pahle (Potsdam Institute for Climate)
• Sid Petersen (First Climate)
• Anna Rohlfing-Bastian (Goethe University Frankfurt)
• Stefan Reichelstein (University of Mannheim, Stanford University & CEPR Sustainable Finance RPN Member)
• Thorsten Sellhorn (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
• Bjarne Steffen (ETH Zurich).