Against the backdrop of climate change and decarbonisation objectives, the basic infrastructures – transport, energy and water – need to become more sustainable over the course of their entire lifecycles, from design to building, maintenance, operations and eventual decommissioning. Digitalisation, of course, will have a key role to play in advancing this objective, for example by optimising capacity utilisation, thus reducing needs for physical infrastructure expansion.
While rendering infrastructures climate-proof will take different forms across the various network industries all of them will have to confront a set of critical questions pertaining to regulatory policy, financing and taxation, among others. In view of this, the FSR Sustainability Conference will tackle these questions in respect to transport, energy and water infrastructures.
In the context of the annual FSR sustainability conference, we are calling for abstracts (and later papers) on the broad topic of ”Greening infrastructures”. Papers can cover the decarbonisation of the transport, the energy and the water infrastructures separately or combined and focus on policy and regulatory measures furthering their decarbonisation against the backdrop of rapid climate change. The context is of course the European Green Deal, and the recently published ‘Fit for 55’ Package, with which the Commission seeks to make the EU’s climate, energy, land use, transport and taxation policies fit for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. Papers should also take into account the various digitalisation efforts, as well corresponding policies linking digitalisation and decarbonisation.
Contributions utilising multidisciplinary, as well as interdisciplinary approaches are very welcome. Papers, linking academia and practice, as well as policy research papers, are particularly encouraged.
The conference is intended for academics such as PhD students, PostDocs and Assistant/associate/full Professors, as well as academically minded practitioners.
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