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Modelling and assessing energy and climate strategies for Switzerland


Climate change has become a focal point of the societal and political debate in many countries. Economists have contributed to this debate by assessing the climate problem as well as different proposals for climate policy. A central part of this work is to analyse the economic consequences of different emission scenarios.

Swiss Energy and Climate

In this context, we are happy to introduce the special issue on modelling climate policy in Switzerland. Under the umbrella of the Swiss Energy Modelling Platform (SEMP), five modelling teams have contributed to assessing the economic and technological consequences of reaching Swiss emission targets up to 2050. Working with harmonised business-as-usual assumptions, most models find that the climate targets can be reached at modest aggregate costs. Also, most models find that a cost-effective approach towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions relies on replacing fossil fuels with electricity and thus do not recommend a decrease in electricity use, as envisioned in the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050.

In addition to these contributions to the current policy debate, the multi-model comparison facilitated by SEMP helps to identify common trends and differences across models that stem from different modelling frameworks and parametrizations and thus to gain more robust insights to what extent the choice of a modelling framework shapes the results of the analysis.

Florian Landis, Frank Krysiak and Adriana Marcucci 

Published: 13th September, 2019

  1. This paper is a contribution to assessing the Swiss energy transition, with an emphasis on the consequences of decommissioning the nuclear power plants for the electricity market and the whole economy. We expe...

    Authors: Sophie Maire, Philippe Thalmann and Frank Vöhringer
    Citation: Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 2019 155:13
  2. Collaborating under the Swiss Energy Modeling Platform (SEMP), five modeling teams (employing an energy systems model and four macroeconomic models with a focus on energy) have carried out a multi-model compar...

    Authors: Florian Landis, Adriana Marcucci, Sebastian Rausch, Ramachandran Kannan and Lucas Bretschger
    Citation: Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 2019 155:12
  3. Swiss targets for climate policy require significant reductions of emissions by 2050. While such reductions can be achieved in a cost-efficient manner by employing taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, such taxes...

    Authors: Florian Landis
    Citation: Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 2019 155:11
  4. In Switzerland, transportation represents 41% of CO2 emissions from energy combustion (2016), a much higher share than in the European Union (EU) (28%) or even the USA (34%). While total Swiss CO2 emissions decre...

    Authors: Philippe Thalmann and Marc Vielle
    Citation: Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 2019 155:10
  5. This paper studies the growth impacts of realizing two long-term carbon targets in Switzerland (reducing CO2 emissions in 2050 by 72% and 80% relative to 1990 levels) with alternative steering-based climate polic...

    Authors: Adriana Marcucci and Lin Zhang
    Citation: Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 2019 155:9