The Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of sustainable development and global governance. FEEM’s mission is to improve – through research – the rigor, credibility and quality of decision making in public and private spheres. FEEM research is structured around three broad research programmes: Sustainable Development, Institutions and Markets, Global Challenges. Key research topics to LCS are climate change modelling and policy; forestry, land-use and land cover change; sustainable energy; sustainability indicators; international carbon markets and the financing of climate policy; Sustainable energy; Sustainability indicators; Water management.
FEEM researchers have developed novel modelling tools for the economic analysis of policies aimed at climate change control, addressing world-wide vulnerability, mitigation, impacts and adaptation to climate change from a LCS perspective. On the mitigation side, FEEM is positioned at the forefront of international research through the use of the in-house developed energy-economy-climate model WITCH, a dynamic integrated model of the world economy that provides normative information on the optimal response of the economic system to climate change damage and policy. On the impacts and adaptation side, FEEM is investigating the general equilibrium effects of climate change on the world economy, through the use of ICES, a recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model built by FEEM researchers, assessing a wide set of climate change impacts (including sea level rise, impacts on health, tourism, agricultural productivity, intensity and frequency of extreme events and energy demand).
Other key FEEM research topics from a LCS perspective are: forestry, land-use and land cover change (modeling exercises investigate the socio- economic and environmental effects of land-use change, of the development of biofuels, and the integration of REDD in the carbon market, with the aim to provide support to policies on the design of future climate agreements), sustainable energy (economic analysis of externalities in the energy sector, of renewable energy sources- in particular bio-energy- and of the role of innovation in energy technologies, addressing security of energy supply and innovation and the relationships between energy use and technological change, including learning by doing and R&D, and international spillovers), sustainability indicators (to provide the qualitative and quantitative assessments necessary for linking key well-being and sustainability indicators with mainstream economic indicators), international carbon markets and the financing of climate policy (analysis of carbon price dynamics both in the short and long term, with the use of financial modelling techniques).
FEEM LCS related research activities include: its key role in the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC), the ITALIAN research centre on climate science and policy, within which FEEM is responsible for the Climate Impact and Policies Division, as well as other partnerships in relevant research projects and networks.The CMCC aims at developing a fully integrated analytical framework for climate control policies coupling FEEM in-house built economic models (WITCH, ICES) with environmental ones (CC-ESM, i.e. the CMCC Carbon earth System Model, and LUC@CMCC, i.e. the CMCC Land-Use Change Model). Other relevant activities include international research projects (CIRCE, ClimateCost, ENSEMBLES, ESETA TOCSIN,VECTOR 2, IFCG) and networks (CPN, CTN, EAERE, ECF).
