How to deal with the rebound effect? A policy-oriented approach

By David Font Vivanco, René Kemp, E. Voet. 2016

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policy makers and environmental agencies have echoed concerns brought forward by academics about the need to address the rebound effect for achieving absolute energy and environmental decoupling. However, such concerns have generally not been translated into tangible policy action. The reasons behind this inaction are not fully understood, and much remains unknown about the status of the rebound effect issue on the policy agenda and policy pathways available. Such knowledge gaps may hamper the development of effective policies to address this issue. In this paper, we examine the extent to and ways in which the rebound effect is considered in policy documents and analyse thirteen specific policy pathways for rebound mitigation. The effectiveness of the pathways is scrutinised and conclusions are offered to mitigate rebound effects. The main policy conclusions of the paper are that an appropriate policy design and policy mix are key to avoiding undesired outcomes, such as the creation of additional rebound effects and environmental trade-offs. From the discussion, economy-wide cap-and-trade systems as well as energy and carbon taxes, when designed appropriately, emerge as the most effective policies in setting a ceiling for emissions and addressing energy use across the economy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba5ee2d90a1d38116eff08042ea10045303d2b34

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Citations in the corpus

Energy rebound as a potential threat to a low-carbon future: findings from a new exergy-based national-level rebound approach (2017, background): “[16] find only two other examples—in Ireland and the USA—of policy including rebound effects: For the most part though, rebound is absent from energy policy: for example there is no mention of rebound in the UK’s Energy Bill [17] or the European Commission’s Energy Directive [3].”
Will technology advances alleviate climate change? Dual effects of technology change on aggregate carbon dioxide emissions (2017, background): “…the development of economy and the corresponding energy consumption, which is known as the “rebound effect” (Hertwich, 2005; Herring and Roy, 2007; Sorrell, 2007; Sorrell and Dimitropoulos, 2008; Sorrell et al., 2009; Grant et al., 2016; Lin and Zhao, 2016; Vivanco et al., 2016;Wei and Liu, 2017).”
The effects of environmental innovations on CO2 emissions: Empirical evidence from Europe (2021, background): “Other studies underline the existence of a short-152 term rebound effect especially for environmental technologies related to energy efficiency and transportation (Font Vivanco et al., 2016; Herring and Sorrell, 2009; Sorrell, 2007).”