Renate Schubert
Renate Schubert, Director and Founder of the Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED)
"We can develop the nicest technologies we can think of, but if they are not implemented, it's worthless."
Interview with Renate Schubert
by Elke Hodson
Prof. Schubert's career is a living example of walking the talk when it comes to environmental and sustainability issues.
In 2006, Prof. Schubert, along with 5 colleagues, founded the IED, which brought together environmental social science research at ETHZ under one umbrella. The center houses economists, political scientists, and psychologists; two of each foster interdisciplinary research across the three disciplines.
Currently, all six research groups at the IED are collaborating within the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability (CCES) project, ClimPol . Like it sounds, ClimPol is about climate policy and barriers to acting on scientific knowledge. "Why is so much known [about global warming] and so little done? What are the barriers? What can be done to overcome these?" asks Prof. Schubert.
To provide a public discussion forum for these questions, the IED hosted and will host an ETHZ panel discussion both before and after the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The Post-Copenhagen forum will discuss questions such as "Is it still possible to have an international binding treaty or should the focus be on other political mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, globally??
Closer to home, Prof. Schubert is quick to point out that the electric company serving Zurich, EWZ, recently used a crafty economic tool, called a default mechanism, to encourage customers to buy more energy produced from renewable sources.
What EWZ did was to tell their customers that they would be purchasing more green electricity unless the customer explicitly called EWZ to request otherwise. Thus, the default--not doing anything--meant that most customers began purchasing a higher percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.
Prof. Schubert studies the conditions needed for such default mechanisms to work properly.
Beyond environmental economics, Prof. Schubert's group focuses on risk behavior, i.e. the decisions we make based on how likely we think the outcome will be. Her research has uncovered reasons why women in all countries across the globe tend to invest their money in less risky ways which return smaller long-term dividends.
Women, it turns out, are completely willing to invest in more risky portfolios, but only if they receive more information than men about what exactly will be happening to their money.
Honoring her accomplishments to date, in 2000 Prof. Schubert was appointed to the WBGU, the German advisory council on global change, which she headed from 2004 - 2008. Within this council, Prof. Schubert is directly influencing environmental policy decisions in Germany.
In light of her experience, how does she view environmental social science research at ETHZ? "Awareness is coming at ETH, that social scientists need to be included [in environmental research projects]," replies Prof. Schubert. "We can develop the nicest technologies we can think of, but if they are not implemented, it's worthless."
The IED is organizing a conference about environmental decision making running from 25-29 April 2010 at the Centro Stefano Franscini on Monte Verita in Switzerland. Please click here for more information.
!!! This document is stored in the ETH Web archive and is no longer maintained !!!