Franz Prettenthaler

From ownership to service use lifestyle: the potential of car sharing

Abstract The shift from ownership to service use, often promoted in concepts of sustainability, has recently become available in private vehicle mobility. Currently 38 000 people in a number of European cities are participating. This example is used here, to analyze the characteristics of people sharing one ‘material’ product as well as to investigate which services they actually render. Different views on the latter imply different evaluations of the size of the market potential and different conclusions on the effectiveness of various policy instruments. When service use is a separate lifestyle, policy instruments have to ultimately foster it directly, rather than changing economic costs at the margin only.

Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts

Executive Summary.- Introduction.- Part I: Cost on Opportunities of Climate Change at the European Level.- Part II: Evaluation at the National Level: Methodological Issues.- Part III: Fields of Impact.- Part IV: Aggregate Evaluation.

On flood risk pooling in Europe

In this paper, we review and discuss some challenges in insuring flood risk in Europe on the national level, including high correlation of damages. Making use of recent advances in extreme value theory, we, furthermore, model flood risk with heavy-tailed distributions and their truncated counterparts and apply the discussed techniques to an inflation- and building-value-adjusted annual data set of flood losses in Europe. The analysis leads to Value-at-Risk estimates for individual countries and for Europe as a whole, allowing to quantify the diversification potential for flood risk in Europe. Finally, we identify optimal risk pooling possibilities in case a joint insurance strategy on the European level cannot be realized and quantify the resulting inefficiency in terms of additional necessary solvency capital. Thus, the results also contribute to the ongoing discussion on how public risk transfer mechanisms can supplement missing private insurance coverage.

Creativity reconsidered - so your firm is creative, but how much? A trans-sectoral and continuous approach to creative industries†

The paper addresses the problem of conceptualization and operationalization of creative industries. It gives a short review of existing approaches and concepts and points to their limits. It suggests new ways of defining creative industries by emphasizing two aspects: the trans-sectoral character of creativity: it is not sectors that are creative per se; and that creativity has to be conceived along a continuum. On the basis of different characteristics of activities, products and services of firms, an index of creativity ranging from not creative to very creative is developed. A case study based on a survey of firms shows that there is a broad range of creative behaviour and that most firms are creative to at least some degree. This leads to new options for future research and for the analysis of spatial differences as well as to a new focus for policies in support of creativity.

Catastrophe Management: Riverine Flooding

Losses from natural disasters are on the rise and risk management options for lessening direct as well as indirect consequences are gaining in importance. Riverine flooding is one key concern and climate change is globally projected to increase intensity and frequency of flooding burden - albeit, due to numerous uncertainties there is only low confidence in projected changes. On the other hand, there is high confidence that today’s and future losses are rising as more assets and people are moving in harm’s way. The quantitative assessment of flood risk is complex, as such extreme event risk is characterized by few observations (low probability) associated with massive consequences (high impact), which by definition means substantial uncertainty around any estimates, particularly if future drivers, such as from climate change, need to be addressed as well. The methodology of choice is probabilistic catastrophe modelling, which combines hazard (flood intensity and frequency) with exposure (people and assets) and their vulnerability (susceptibility of exposed people and assets to incur losses for a given hazard). In order to properly account for uncertainty, we present three different catastrophe risk modelling approaches that outline the scope for possible changes in flood risk in Austria over the next 90 years. The analysis and findings are particularly relevant for Austria’s Natural Disaster Fund, which is the primary disaster loss financing vehicle in Austria. Large uncertainties between the different approaches and various limitations restrict our general conclusion as well as a full comparison between the approaches. However, we discuss possibilities to overcome these barriers in the future including suggestions how to arrive at more robust solutions in the face of such large uncertainties.

The impacts of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas

ABSTRACT This study investigates the effects of climate change on tourist mobility in mountain areas, distinguishing between infrastructure, transport operation and travel demand. We examine change in tourist travel demand by proposing a two-step approach to forecast its future development. A multi-origin, multi-destination model for tourism demand quantifies the variation in overnight stays within a given region, and a linear, deterministic model determines the traffic-related implications. The method, tested on the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Italy), exhibits expected variations in winter and summer travel demand up to 2080 under different scenarios. Results reveal that average summer traffic can be more than twice as intense as average winter traffic, contributing to significantly increasing the peak days of congestion along the Provincial road network. Despite this evidence, all stakeholders seem to be at an early stage in incorporating this information into their strategic planning. The need for adequate transport policies and measures is considered essential to obtain the optimal balance of transport modes that will be required in the near future.

A Summary of Sector and Region Specific Economic Impact and Vulnerability Assessments by Case Study in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary

This paper summarises the main economic findings of an interdisciplinary EU project (FP6) which studied the impacts of climate change in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Economic impact assessments were carried out at region and sector specific case study levels. Results suggest positive economic impacts related to climate change on agriculture in the Bulgarian case study region, whereas no clear message about impact direction could be derived for the Romanian region under investigation. The studied climate change impacts on tourism are tendentially negative in the regions considered within the single tourism case studies. The conducted energy case studies also suggest (small and sometimes insignificant) negative economic impacts of climate change within specific configurations assumed. Vulnerability of the public sector has been assessed by analysing the countries’ risk transfer mechanisms with respect to damages from extreme weather events.