Significant published documentary and academic literature already exists on many levels covering the concept of carbon allowances, personal carbon trading, tradable energy quotas, national emissions allocations, internationally negotiated emissions reductions reflecting historical emissions, and a just transition to a zero carbon world.

We are particularly interested in economic modelling with the Minsky system dynamics package to investigate potential economic scenarios with a carbon currency based on carbon allowances, and the various facets of the policy as a dual currency monetary system.

A second focus area is the effects of interaction of citizens within a group undertaking non-trivial climate action in their everyday lives.

Policy action to date has been limited to some instances of carbon taxes and carbon pricing, all of which affect the poor more than the rich. For example, the inequities of the carbon tax measure in France caused the “Yellow Vests” protests. Such proposals float the concept of compensating the poor for higher taxes or prices, but the compensation mechanisms are rarely enacted, would be slow in practice, and leave the poor no better off, either absolutely or relative to the rich. The conceptual competition here is with the Canadian carbon tax for example, where revenues are returned to citizens as a dividend.

The carbon allowances policy would, we hypothesise, benefit the poor substantially and not adversely impact middle income citizens – data shows that the mean carbon footprint is actually significantly higher than the median due to extreme quantities of CO₂ emissions produced by wealthy people. The ability to sell carbon tokens to supplement one’s income should result in a political popularity for combating climate change this way. With our research, economic modelling and projections, we hope to replace the old common question “when are we going to introduce a carbon tax?” with the same question but substituting ‘allowance’ for the word ‘tax’.

But society faces a polycrisis, not just uncontrolled CO₂ emissions. It is multi-faceted. Our focus is on the intersection of environmental and economic issues, to link our research to other work on e.g. planetary boundaries, circular economies, biodiversity loss, and ecological footprints.

EcoCore is targetting several research topics, collaborating with researchers at various academic institutions working in this field. We are looking for post-docs, doctoral researchers, masters students and similarly diploma or undergraduate students interested in this area.

Reducing one’s carbon footprint via participation in a personal carbon trading group raises many issues across several different academic disciplines, including history, sociology, psychology, economics, business administration, sales and marketing, finance, environmental science, political science, and law.

We plan to attract undergraduates and postgraduates looking for dissertation or research topics, by collaborating with research supervisors at various academic institutions working in this field. There are three main areas where this sort of research can happen: final year undergraduate research projects (and summer projects for undergraduates); projects/dissertations that are part of most master’s degree programmes (and similar level diplomas); doctoral research projects.

Undergraduates normally will have had 2 years of degree work before attempting a dissertation, the norm is 3 years but there are a lot of 4 year programmes now: some with a year in industry and some with a year abroad. For postgraduates, the qualifications and experience are clear. The competence of the students will be difficult to judge beforehand but one can assume that they have shown some competence in getting to where they are.

In all cases the research is supervised by at least one academic supervisor at their institutions. There are some science/engineering projects where the work is done in industry or somewhere else supervised by someone employed in the industry but there will always be academic oversight.

Satisfactory projects should result in at least one publication in a peer-reviewed journal, at the very least in open access publication websites and the like. Results would be published under the name of the people doing the work and normally the supervisor giving the address of the institution(s) involved. News media articles that follow linking to the research would be dealt with by both EcoCore and the institution. EcoCore itself will in many cases produce articles using the research.

In all cases the research must be supervised by at least one academic supervisor at their institutions. There are some science/engineering projects where the work is done in industry or somewhere else supervised by someone employed in the industry but there must always be academic oversight.

If you are interested in collaborative research, please get in touch.