Abstract
As humanity’s current production and consumption patterns exceed planetary boundaries, many opinion leaders have stressed the need to adopt green economic stimulus policies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This paper provides an integrated framework to design an economic recovery strategy aligned with sustainability objectives through a multi-criterion, multi-stakeholder lens. The aim is to enable decisions by policy makers with the aid of transparent workflows that include expert evidence that is based on quantitative open-source modeling, and qualitative input by diverse social actors in a participatory approach. The paper employs an energy systems model and an economic input-output model to provide quantitative evidence and design a multi-criteria decision process that engages stakeholders from government, enterprises, and civil society. As a case study, the paper studies 13 green recovery measures that are relevant for Cyprus and assesses their appropriateness for criteria related to environmental sustainability, socioeconomic and job impact, and climate resilience. The results highlight trade-offs between immediate and long-run effects, between economic and environmental objectives, and between expert evidence and societal priorities. Importantly, the paper finds that a “return-to-normal†economic stimulus is not only environmentally unsustainable, but also economically inferior to most green recovery schemes.
Highlights
Since mid-2020, despite the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of governments around the world has partly moved from the provision of immediate relief to the design and implementation of economic recovery measures for the short and medium term
We developed a novel integrated assessment framework for the appraisal of economic recovery measures with the aid of multi-criteria decision analysis, which incorporates both quantitative data derived from models and qualitative input provided by several stakeholders
With regard to economic output generation, in the short-run measures M4 and M5 create the highest economy-wide effects relative to the reference scenario; for every million euros (M€) invested for these interventions, the total output of the economy increases by 1.45 M€ and 1.44M€ respectively in 2022/23
Summary
Since mid-2020, despite the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of governments around the world has partly moved from the provision of immediate relief to the design and implementation of economic recovery measures for the short and medium term. Moving from generic declarations to specific national policies, requires a lot of groundwork to be done because each country has to identify those interventions which fit with its special conditions, resources, and needs. In the European Union, the ‘ Generation EU’ program and the Multiannual Financial Framework, i.e. the EU budget for 2021-2027, which were agreed by EU leaders in July 2020, offer significant opportunities for financing projects with the potential to contribute to sustainable long-term economic development and CCG (European Council, 2020). Nationally-owned economic recovery strategies have to be designed and implemented in each country
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