Prof. Eric Le Fur (p)

This paper examines how climate change affects the geography of professional road cycling events in France. Using an original dataset combining annual climate indicators and the historical distribution of stage starts and finishes for the Tour de France, Paris–Nice, Paris–Roubaix, and the Critérium du Dauphiné between 2000 and 2025, the study evaluates whether long‑term climatic conditions or short‑term temperature extremes influence the selection of host cities. Descriptive analyses reveal a clear upward trend in average and maximum temperatures, alongside an intensification of heatwave episodes. However, cross‑sectional regressions show that long‑term climate variables do not explain the spatial distribution of starts and finishes, which remains strongly shaped by historical, institutional, and logistical factors. Poisson models confirm that annual temperature variations and extreme heat events have not yet significantly altered the geography of major races. These findings suggest that, while climate change is already transforming the environmental context of professional cycling, it has not yet reconfigured the territorial structure of events. Nevertheless, the increasing frequency of extreme temperatures poses significant challenges for local authorities, organizers, and tourism stakeholders. They will increasingly need to integrate climate adaptation into event planning, infrastructure investment, and territorial development strategies.

Mr Giwoong Park (p), Prof. Donghyun Kim

The mismatch between carbon emissions and mitigation responsibility impedes carbon neutrality and sustainable development. This study defines regional carbon inequality as a spatial mismatch between emissions and burdens, where specific regions monopolize economic benefits from emissions while others bear disproportionate mitigation burdens. Such inequality hinders long-term national carbon neutrality by causing resource misallocation, negative externalities, and carbon lock-in. Although regional planners recognize this inequality and attempt to resolve it, they face bounded rationality constraints, including information asymmetry, cognitive limitations, and organizational inertia. Consequently, these decision-making patterns risk solidifying or intensifying carbon inequality rather than resolving it. However, existing studies focus primarily on quantitative emission gaps, neglecting the underlying cognitive and behavioral mechanisms from a bounded rationality perspective. Accordingly, this study empirically analyzes regional carbon inequality and identifies underlying mechanisms using a mixed-methods approach. The analysis covers 229 South Korean municipalities from 2010 to 2023. First, the quantitative phase employs panel stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to measure carbon emission efficiency. The model incorporates labor, capital, and energy consumption as inputs, with gross regional product and carbon emissions as outputs. Subsequently, Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition identifies the drivers of the carbon intensity gap between the top 20% (high-efficiency) and bottom 20% (low-efficiency) groups. The qualitative phase aims to figure out the mechanisms of widening carbon inequality based on the theory of planners' bounded rationality. To this end, 90 carbon neutrality-related planning documents were selected from the high-efficiency and low-efficiency groups. SFA results indicate an approximate 63% gap in average carbon emission efficiency between the two groups. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition reveals that the unexplained component accounts for approximately 43% of the carbon intensity gap, suggesting disparities in regional policy levels and planning capabilities. Grounded theory analysis shows that low-efficiency regions adopt satisficing strategies, failing to devise independent solutions to external constraints. Specifically, these regions uncritically imitate high-tech technologies from leading cities without considering local contexts or fill plans with rhetorical declarations lacking concrete implementation measures. In conclusion, regional carbon inequality stems not only from exogenous resource deficits but also from endogenous factors, including planning capacity. Achieving carbon neutrality therefore requires policy support to supplement the insufficient planning capacity of lagging regions.

Dr. Elisabete Figueiredo (p), Dr. Bruno Baptista, Dr. Alexandra Monteiro

Air pollution is widely recognised as one of the most pressing environmental and public health challenges of our time. It contributes significantly to premature mortality, chronic disease, and reduced quality of life, particularly in urban areas. Globally, air pollution is responsible for approximately seven million deaths each year and is considered the most significant environmental health risk in Europe. The intensification of air pollution is associated with a broad set of structural and socioeconomic factors, including patterns of production and consumption, urbanisation processes, mobility systems, and industrial activity, all of which contribute to increased pollutant concentrations, especially in densely populated areas. Although the relationship between air pollution and contemporary lifestyles is well documented, alongside substantial advances in air pollution monitoring technologies, modelling techniques, and regulatory frameworks, limited attention has been devoted to social perceptions, everyday practices, and citizens’ willingness to participate in air-quality-related decision-making, particularly at the local level.
Against this backdrop, this study aims to analyse residents’ willingness to participate in local decision-making processes on air pollution in two parishes of the Metropolitan Area of Porto (MAP), Portugal: Campanhã (municipality of Porto) and Rio Mau (municipality of Penafiel. Drawing on survey data collected from 1,205 residents, the study examines how social perceptions of air pollution, socioeconomic vulnerabilities, sociodemographic characteristics, and health exposure inequalities shape respondents’ willingness to engage in participatory governance.
Results demonstrate that willingness to participate in air pollution-related decision-making is not evenly distributed across the population but is strongly shaped by socioeconomic condition, age, place of residence, and perceptions of pollution. Individuals who express greater awareness of health impacts, environmental inequalities, and the broader societal consequences of air pollution are significantly more inclined to engage in governance processes. In contrast, those who perceive pollution as distant, stable, or primarily the responsibility of governmental authorities, tend to remain disengaged. These findings highlight the central role of social perceptions and lived experiences in shaping civic engagement, reinforcing the argument that environmental governance cannot be detached from questions of social vulnerability, knowledge access, and everyday practices.

Dr. Enrico Turco, Dr. Massimiliano Carlo Pietro Rizzati (p), Dr. Emanuele Ciola, Prof. Sergio Vergalli

Climate change is expected to generate substantial economic damages, but these impacts are highly uneven across space and agents, raising concerns about the amplification of economic inequality. While existing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) capture aggregate and regional average effects, they largely abstract from within-region heterogeneity and from key adaptation mechanisms such as trade, migration, and sectoral reallocation.
This paper investigates the aggregate and distributional impacts of climate change across European regions, focusing on the interaction between localized climate damages and endogenous economic adjustment. We extend a multi-regional agent-based Integrated Assessment Model of the MATRIX family to include four European macro-regions calibrated on national data, linked through endogenous trade and migration flows within a common currency area. Climate damages enter through region- and sector-specific micro-level shocks derived from the JRC-PESETA IV database under alternative IPCC AR6 temperature scenarios. Weather-related shocks affect households' human capital, firms' productivity, and physical capital stocks via stochastic exposure and damage processes, generating heterogeneous impacts at the agent level.
We conduct three sets of simulation experiments. First, we quantify regional GDP and inequality effects under five warming scenarios ranging from +1.6°C to +4.4°C. Second, we decompose aggregate losses into contributions from human capital, productivity, and physical capital damage channels. Third, we assess the role of endogenous adaptation by comparing the baseline economy with counterfactual scenarios in which inter-regional trade or migration is shut down.
Our results show that climate change substantially amplifies regional inequality within the European Union. Under a +4.4°C scenario, GDP losses range from approximately −3.6% in Central Europe to nearly −9% in Eastern Europe. Damage transmission mechanisms differ markedly across regions: capital destruction from floods dominates in the East, heat-related human capital losses are most severe in the South, and productivity disruptions from droughts and storms are most relevant in the North. Trade acts as a key stabilizing mechanism, particularly for Northern and Central regions, whereas migration tends to amplify regional disparities by reinforcing labour outflows from already vulnerable areas. We also document a sectoral paradox whereby capital-goods producers benefit from reconstruction demand following climate disasters despite overall welfare losses, a "broken window" effect.
These findings underscore the need for region-specific climate adaptation policies and caution against uniform mitigation and resilience strategies in economically integrated areas.

Mr Shane Dunne (p), Dr Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis, Dr Olga Ivanova, Prof Tatiana Filatova

Climate change is increasingly recognised not only as an environmental threat but as a structural risk to macroeconomic development. Recent research shows that physical climate damages propagate through highly interconnected inter-sectoral and inter-regional trade networks, generating indirect effects that substantially exceed localised asset losses. Nowhere is this risk more institutionally consequential than in the European Union (EU), which combines deep economic integration with an explicit commitment to territorial cohesion. Yet climate hazards across Europe are spatially concentrated, raising a fundamental question: can Europe’s fiscal architecture prevent physical climate risk from becoming a persistent driver of regional divergence?

In prior work, we developed a dynamic multi-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model disaggregated to 234 NUTS-2 regions to quantify the economy-wide effects of sea-level rise and river flooding. Bottom-up estimates of direct capital destruction were propagated through interregional trade, capital mobility, and sectoral linkages to generate projections to 2100. We found that climate-induced flooding acts as a strongly divergent force: under a 3°C warming scenario, GDP losses in the most affected regions approach 51% by century’s end. Lower-income regions are disproportionately exposed, leading to rising inequality both within and between member states.

These findings challenge the EU’s regional convergence objectives. Although substantial cross-regional transfers are embedded within the EU budget framework, allocations remain largely income-based and only indirectly responsive to physical climate exposure.

This paper extends our CGE framework to explicitly model EU fiscal transfers under escalating climate hazards. We compare the current income-based allocation structure with alternative transfer rules that condition support on realised climate damages or forward-looking exposure indicators. Our central contribution is to quantify how alternative fiscal architectures shape the long-run distributional and macroeconomic consequences of climate risk across European regions.