ESR 12

In this PhD project secondary data e.g. from the World Bank or the International Energy Agency (IEA) and insights from the recent H2020 project MEDEAS will be used to:

1. Bring in and advance theoretical and empirical insights from Ecological Economics, Industrial Ecology, Energy Analysis, Graph Theory, Networks Science and Game Theory;
2. Use these insights to draw analytical maps of the global network of oil (energy) flows in the socio-economic system, taking into account both quantity and quality of the resource including price mechanisms;
3. Quantification of flows for the design of a ‘mind-sized’ oil (energy) flow-model e.g. system dynamics combined with Input-Output models and social network analysis; (4) Identify critical nodes that determine flows and systemic robustness, which could be used as flow-limiting agents for policies designed to meet carbon budgets and counteract limitations (resource peaks). Moreover, this is expected to provide theoretical insights into the specific functioning of the energy-economy nexus; help to make the link with other nexus e.g. the water-economy nexus and to explore the “why” of connections within networks (as to the “how”).

The project includes research collaboration with IIASA (AT), Masaryk University Brno (CZ), University of Groningen (NL), Jacobs University Bremen (G), European University Cyprus, the UK Environmental Agency and dependent on the specific research needs other partners of the network.