Professor Hans Wiesmeth from Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) visit ISET last Thursday to present one of his recent papers “The Environmental Kuznets Curve”, co-authored with Shlomo Weber from New Economic School.

Professor Wiesmeth talked about climate change (especially global warming) in the world and environmental problems caused by carbon dioxide levels in the air, which is now at its highest levels in history. As GDP per capita is increasing in the country after some point level of carbon dioxide in that country decreases but generally in the world total amount is increasing year after year, as many countries are still on developing stage when alongside the process of development, level of carbon dioxide in the air is increasing. Since our environment is a public good, he outlined the role of cooperation within countries while dealing with these issues.

His paper applies analysis to the global reduction of greenhouse gases and its relevance for mitigation of climate change, also with respect to the new climate agreement to be concluded in Paris in 2015. The paper’s ultimate prescription advocates for the role of "awareness" in this context. The effects of awareness and economic parameters on mitigation efforts can be disentangled, the possibility of an "Environmental Kuznets Curve" is investigated. The second part of the paper provides rankings of awareness for climate change and considers the possibility of an "equitable" burden-sharing. In these empirical investigations, estimates of awareness are derived from observable data, yielding an empirical "Environmental Kuznets Curve".

The ISET community would like to thank Professor Hans Wiesmeth for a very interesting presentation and for giving much deeper analyses of the problem.