Horizon Europe Speed Project: Territorial Policies for the Environment and Equitable Development

Over the past few decades, the connection between the economy and climate has gained significant importance. However, while academics and policymakers have questioned the sustainability of the global economy, numerous factors have limited the design and implementation of globally coordinated mitigation policies. Therefore, predictions about the potential impacts on the global economy, and especially on low-income countries, are not optimistic. In this context, developed economies are unilaterally designing and implementing stricter environmental policies, such as the European Green Deal (EGD): a set of transformative policies for the European Union (EU) that seek to ensure net-zero emissions in the EU, leaving no one and nowhere behind.

These territorial policies—that is, those implemented within the EU and not elsewhere—are ambitious but risky, due to their interactions with the less stringent rest of the world (e.g., taxing emissions by forcing energy-intensive industries to reallocate their resources outside the EU). How can the interaction of these environmental policies, with each other and with the rest of the world, affect the EU's transition to a growing, net-zero-emissions economy? How can we ensure that this process entails equitable economic development within the EU and globally? The SPEED (Spatial Policies for Environment and Equitable Development) project will answer these questions.

To do so, it will begin by laying the ideal theoretical foundations with state-of-the-art spatial economic models capable of integrating a wide range of spatial policies. It will then combine these models with new high-resolution spatial datasets and conduct counterfactual policy experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of these policies (and the underlying economic mechanisms). This hybrid theoretical-empirical approach will provide well-founded and carefully quantified answers to the questions posed, informing policymakers about the advantages and disadvantages of spatial policies such as EGDs.