POLFREE
- Home
- About POLFREE
- POLFREE Partners
- Research Areas
- Publications
- Summary of POLFREE results
- News and Events
Sponsored by:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 308371.
About POLFREE
The project will construct a
theoretical framework for the analysis of resource efficiency, with
detailed comparison of the trends and policies at EU and Member State
(MS) level, cross-country econometric analysis to derive
resource-reduction cost curves, and an analysis of business barriers to
resource efficiency; thereby developing an enhanced understanding of the
drivers of inefficient resource use.
This will lead to an
exploration of new concepts and paradigms that can bring about a radical
increase in resource efficiency, and a vision for a resource-efficient
economy in the EU, with suggestions also for new more resource-efficient
business models for firms, and ideas for a global governance regime
that can promote resource-efficient economies among the EU's trading
partners and more widely will be explored. From its new vision for a
resource-efficient Europe, the project will propose new policy mixes,
business models and mechanisms of global governance through which
resource-efficient economies may be promoted.
This will lead in
turn to intensive work on creating, modelling and visualising scenarios
for the emergence of resource-efficient economies, through linking
quantitative economic and ecological models, and simulating the policies
and policy mixes derived in the earlier work, supplemented with
appropriate LCA analysis for selected products and sectors, to ensure
that the policies and business models in the scenarios lead to adequate
absolute decoupling of economic activity from resource use and
environmental degradation. The scenarios and associated policy analysis
will be given an integrated interpretation across economic, ecological
and social dimensions.
The project will be explicitly geared to
support policy efforts and initiatives on resource efficiency in the
European Commission, and will involve a wide range of stakeholders from
business, the policy world, and NGOs. The results will be widely
disseminated in a variety of innovative ways.