Congratulations to Professor Francesco Lamperti for winning an ERC Starting Grant!

We are delighted to announce that Professor Francesco Lamperti, associate professor at the Institute of Economics of the Sant’Anna School and member of L'EMbeDS Managing Board, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for his project FIND - Finance and Innovation to couple Negative emissions and sustainable Development (the European Research Council has awarded also another researcher of Sant'Anna School, prof. Leonardo Cappello).

The FIND project aims to investigate the feasibility of carbon removal strategies and their potential for sustainable development, starting from the following assumption: to hold global warming to the crucial 1.5°C threshold, as stipulated in the Paris Agreements, it is clear that reducing emissions from energy production and industrial processes will not suffice. A more holistic approach is needed, one that involves negative emission technologies (NETs) - removing substantial amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using pioneering technologies.

However, NETs are not a silver bullet. They are risky, immature, and controversial. They raise important questions about their feasibility, impact, and governance. How and where will they be developed, diffused, and deployed? How will they affect sustainable development? How can we design effective policies to support a net-zero society by 2050?

These are some of the questions that FIND project will try to answer, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines innovation studies, economic geography, financial economics, complex system modeling, and macroeconomic analysis.

All the L'EMbeDS community is very proud of Professor Lamperti for this remarkable achievement, and we wish him all the best for his research.