EIB Climate Chair - Chair in Climate Change Policy and International Carbon Markets

The EIB Chair in Climate Change Policy and International Carbon Markets was founded at the Florence School of Transnational Governance in 2020 with the appointment of Professor Jos Delbeke, PhD in Economics (KU Leuven, Belgium) and former founding Director-General for Climate Action at the European Commission from 2010 until 2018. In 2025, the EUI and EIB renewed the partnership to secure a second mandate of the Chair (2025-2030).

Mission

The mission of the EIB Chair in Climate Change Policy and International Carbon Markets at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) is to become a European and global hub of excellence in knowledge-exchange, research and education on climate change policies and governance.

Policy Workstreams

The EIB Chair focuses on effective climate policy design with an emphasis on concrete policies and is built around the following three pillars:

• Clean Industrial Policy: The EU Green Deal started as an ambitious environmental project the scale of which required it to encompass the whole economy with business and industry at its core. Designing a pragmatic and balanced industrial policy requires addressing the issues of decarbonisation, competitiveness, and resilience in an integrated manner. The new geopolitical tensions have heightened the attention of important external dependencies, and this creates a new security dimension, not least as far as energy resources and raw materials are concerned. This will require a strategy to maintain a solid industrial base including traditional and new economic sectors, while keeping the trade pattern as open as possible. Domestic support for greening key value chains however comes in most cases at a cost, a so-called green premium, that needs to be covered. Given the size of its market, the EU has significant influence to shape such a policy process in a pragmatic manner.

• Low Carbon Investments: The creation of “an investment Commission”, unleashing the financing needed for the green, digital, and social transitions has been advanced by Ursula von der Leyen as a major objective for the EU policy cycle 2024-2029. Given the recent geopolitical shifts, investment in military equipment and defence need to be added to those original intentions. The framework on sustainable finance agreed under the Green Deal allows for the monitoring whether the financial sector is effective in meeting these investment needs, but a consensus seems to emerge to do this in a less cumbersome and complex manner.

• Carbon Pricing: Today the EU has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to 37% below 1990 levels. The most important policy behind this achievement has been the pricing of carbon. The sectors covered by the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) realised a 47% reduction since 2005. The EU ETS has been at the heart of the decoupling of emissions from economic development. Emissions per head in the EU declined significantly since 1980 and are now close to the world average. The European Green Deal reconfirmed the central role of carbon pricing and notably the EU ETS.  Major policy changes have been agreed and these now need to be implemented in an economic and political landscape that has changed considerably. At the international level, the role of carbon credits is likely to become more important.