Green Transport and Smart Infrastructure


Climate4Media British Council sponsored regional workshops for green road transport

 

Sheri Markose was invited to China to give a talk on the future of low carbon transportation.

26th-30th July 2010 at the following locations in China:

  • Shanghai
  • Guangzhou
  • Shenzhen
  • Beijing

See here for slides of Sheri Markose’s talk


Background

 

Unsustainable developments include:

  • Car ownership and road transport: environmentally unsustainable
  • Leverage & derivatives trading in advanced economies:leading to systemic risk and collapse
  • Pensions in advanced economies with aging populationsSheri Markose has pioneered a research agenda in Economics and Finance that is based on a perspective of markets as complex adaptive systems. She has a special research interest in modelling negative externalities from economic and social behaviour whether they are in the form of financial contagion which arises from excessive risk from leverage or environmental degradation, carbon emissions and road congestion relating to over use of non-renewable resources.

Road Map 1: Climate change and how we deal with congestion and carbon is the biggest challenge of the 21st century

 

  • Challenges posed by road transportation in meeting Kyoto carbon reduction obligations.
  • Road transportation major contributor (30% in US/UK) to CO2 emissions and global warming (2010 study by Nadine Unger of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
  • Growing sector with car ownership increasing in China and India.
  • How effective will electric cars be in CO2 abatement?
  • Smart, green, intelligent infrastructure solutions to city centres: some new thinking and methodology.

Sheri was the lead researcher on the UK Foresight Office of Science and Technology 2006 Intelligent Infrastructure Systems project on designing green and intelligent infrastructure to reduce negative externalities from road transportation in city centres.

Sheri has also contributed to the RSA discussions on how personal carbon trading, analogous to carbon trading to reduce carbon emissions by industry, may effectuate behaviour change in the household sector. In 2007 (Jan 11-12), Sheri co-organized one of the first regional conferences, the so called Essex Congestion and Carbon Conference, which covered topics on Design and Public Policy: Markets for Congestion and Carbon Trading. This format which brings together regional business, government/policy makers and academics along with those at a national and international level was followed up at the East Yorkshire and Humberside Climate Conference in May 2008 . Sheri is also spearing heading research on the digital mapping of transition from high carbon to low carbon in economies using multi-agent models which moves away from oversimplified and reduced form economic models on climate change where static parameters are meant to proxy for complex dynamics in society relating to carbon abatement innovation and adoption.


Further References

 

  1. 2005 Office and Science and Technology Foresight Directorate: Intelligent Infrastructure Project Final Report :
    Intelligent Charging: Smart Market Protocols for Road Transport
    Applying agent-based modelling to investigate a possible congestion solving technology.
  2. Markose S., Alentorn A., Koesrindartoto D., Allen P., Blythe P. and Grosso S. (2007). “A smart market for passenger road transport (SMPRT) congestion: An application of computational mechanism design ”, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control , Volume 31, Issue 6, June 2007, Pages 2001-2032, ISSN: 0165-1889.
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Contact

For any further information, please contact scher@essex.ac.uk