Florence Metz receives the prestigious individual ERC Starting Grant of €1.5 million. The ERC Starting Grants, issued by the European Research Council, are designed to support excellent researchers to start an independent research team or programme.
CLIMate policy integration – a comPLEXITY trap?
Climate is a top priority for the European Union; it devotes 30% of its budget (€557 billion) to climate-related spending and requires all policy sectors to take climate priorities into account. Despite these efforts, the EU is still not expected to meet its target of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. According to Florence Metz, a major reason for this failure is that the increasing number of climate policies often contradict each other instead of working coherently together.
Conflicting climate policies create a so-called ‘complexity trap’, which makes it difficult to achieve desired results. Metz predicts a tipping point after which adding new policies does not improve the situation, but paradoxically worsens it as contradictory policies begin to dominate. Metz wants to challenge basic principles with a perspective of complex systems to get ‘beyond the trap’.
Complexity trap
The complexity trap occurs when the number of policies and their interdependencies become too difficult to manage effectively. ‘At first, new policies seem beneficial, but as their number increases, the interactions between them become exponentially more complex,’ says Metz. Understanding and addressing these interdependencies is crucial to creating a coherent and effective policy framework.
Metz wants to create a systemic perspective to understand why these policies do not work well together. She will develop new theories and methods to study how different policies interact and influence each other. By doing so, she hopes to provide policymakers with better insights and tools. The aim is to help create more coherent and effective climate policies that can actually meet the EU's climate goals.
About ERC
The European Research Council funds talented young researchers in setting up an independent research project. The ERC offers four central grant schemes (Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants) and an additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme. These grants allow researchers to start ground-breaking research.
