Brown Bag Seminar with Francesca Larosa
KTH Climate Action Centre's new postdoc Francesca Larosa will host this seminar.
Francesca Larosa is a climate computational economist currently working as a postdoc at KTH. Her interests lie at the intersection of digitalisation and climate change. Prior to joining KTH, Francesca was a postdoc at the University College London. Francesca holds a PhD in Climate Change Sciences and Management from Ca' Foscari University in Venice. She is an affiliated researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate CHange (CMCC) and she is an ambassador of the EU's 'European Climate Pact' for Italy. She will hold a presentation of her work, which will be followed by a discussion. Everybody brings their own lunch.
Time: Wed 2023-03-22 12.00 - 13.00
Location: KTH Climate Action Centre, Teknikringen 43
Language: English
Participating: Francesca Larosa, PhD
The shift towards a climate-neutral economy requires the transformation of the global energy system. Sourcing and mining processes are the backbones of the energy transition as they supply the inputs for critical low-carbon energy technologies, such as solar PVs, batteries and wind turbines. Mining is essential to supply the materials needed to reaching decarbonisation targets, but is also associated with very high environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns throughout mining lifecycles. Industry scrutiny has increased, and ESG concerns have given rise to a large number of initiatives, largely from civil society, that seek to minimise harms and deliver better environmental and social outcomes. At the same time, the finance sector has developed a wide range of principles, frameworks and recommendations that address ESG issues. In this brown-bag seminar, Francesca will provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of governance instruments developed for mining and finance to drive sustainability in these two sectors. The seminar will investigate how finance proposals overlap with and could potentially address civil society concerns about the impacts of mining on the environment, host countries and communities. While strong synergies exist on tackling greenhouse gas emissions, there are still important gaps on safety and human rights. As sustainability is a holistic transdisciplinary effort, for the proposals to be effective, finance sector actors will have to give human rights, including conflict prevention, greater weight than previously.