Description: The goal of this dissertation is to facilitate the assessment of impacts from sustainable measures and projects with an emphasis on impact reporting for Green, Social or Sustainability Bonds in the Sustainable Finance market. It does so by providing analysts with the means to develop, depict, formulate, and assess a causal hypothesis between an intervention and its subsequent effects in an impact-chain, represented by desired environmental (E), social (S) or governance (G) changes. This is achieved by developing a methodology for so-called ESG Logic Models or ESG-LM, that combine heuristic Theories-of-Change with propositional logic and Bayesian Reasoning. Three research questions are investigated and responded to. Research Question 1 asks how such Theories-of-Change can be developed for any type of ESG-related issue and how the different process steps in a causal chain can be classified, hierarchised, and prioritised regarding their efficacy towards overarching sustainability goals and their plausibility. Research Question 2 studies (a) the means by which the analyst or any other interested third party might be warranted in believing the causal claims from an ESG-LM, and (b) how an ESG-LM can be improved if this credence is low. Research Question 3 then looks at the reporting of impacts themselves regarding indicator selection, indicator assessment and indicator quantification as well as the provision of information on the contributions and attributions by different actors. The dissertation draws on a variety of theories and adapts existing methods to achieve that. It operationalises concepts from empirical Sustainable Finance research and already existing impact assessment methodologies. It adapts scholarly and practitioner approaches for theory-based evaluation and applies a qualitative social science perspective towards theory-building and evaluation, while some of the assessment tools in the dissertation are grounded in Logic, Set Theory and Bayesian Epistemology. Examples for such tools include rules for the Attribution by actors, heuristics for the abduction of plausible outcome pathways, or a four-stage Argument and Decision-Tree to assess the credibility of ESG-LM claims (based on Bayes Theorem). My assessment of the entire methodology is positive overall, as it provides solutions to each of the three research areas. Limitations of the approach, and thus opportunities for further research, are the additional expertise and time required by analysts compared to the existing, and somewhat more pragmatic, solutions in the current market. However, this is outweighed in my opinion by the ability of the framework to strongly mitigate impact washing by actors in the financial markets as well as biases by analysts. Its overall methodology also provides opportunities for new research angles in the area of sustainability indicators and assessments.

Description: The project "Plastic Credits - Financing the Transition to the Global Circular Economy" supports the implementation of a waste management structure in India's rural regions. By that it aims to improve the current waste collection and treatment structures in the pilot regions Goa, Maharashtra, and Kerala. Herein, the project focuses on low value plastics (LVP), and especially multi-layer plastics (MLP), that have no market value. In order to analyze the environmental impacts of the project, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was conducted. The considered environmental components comprise: greenhouse gas emissions, usage of primary resources, impacts on marine and terrestrial wildlife, standard of living, and economic costs.

Description: Businesses are under increasing pressure to improve the resource efficiency of their products and services. There is a need for practical tools that enable businesses to implement resource efficiency in their value chains. In this paper, a mixed-method approach for assessing the life-cycle-wide use of natural resources in products and services is applied in a case study on a coffee value chain of the company Mars Incorporated. Material inputs along the entire chain were assessed quantitatively using the Material Input Per unit of Service method, while a semi-quantitative Hot Spot Analysis was performed to identify environmental hot spots. This mixed-method approach has been implemented for the first time in practice to assess the value-chain-wide resource consumption and environmental impacts within a specific value chain of Mars Incorporated. The paper concludes that combining the methods provides better insights into the value chain than using just one of either of the methods alone. For the company, the approach has proven to be practicable because it identifies improvement options and their value-chain-wide resource efficiency potential.

Description: Energy performance contracting (EPC) as a market instrument has been effective in promoting energy efficiency worldwide, but it has encountered many insurmountable obstacles in rural energy management. In this study, based on the characteristics of energy management in rural areas, three EPC modes are designed and tested in 24,000 rural households. The test results show that two adapted EPC modes of local government involvement and energy payment directly from the national grid can effectively overcome the barriers encountered in the traditional EPC modes and work well under the economic and social environmental conditions in rural areas. The key to the adaptation of the traditional EPC modes is the introduction of the local government as the third party. Participation of the third party can effectively reduce and remove the barriers and risks and increase the mutual trust between the clients (households) and the energy service companies (ESCOs). Based on the testing results, this study suggests that governmental departments should formulate relevant EPC policies and technical guidelines within the rural context. This research recommends that farmers should not manage their energy services by themselves and it is suggested to out-contracting ESCOs by applying the modes developed and tested by this paper.

Description: Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute considerably to Germany's carbon emissions, regional savings and cooperative banks - SMEs' most important financiers - hardly consider this aspect in lending to these businesses. However, given Germany's commitment to climate neutrality by 2045, suitable approaches for injecting climate finance into these SME lending processes are greatly required. Against this background, the paper at hand aims to introduce the specific case of regional banks into the debate on green finance and green banking and suggest future research in this context. In discussing the state of research on the peculiarities of regional savings and cooperative banks, we outline the resulting opportunities and limitations for climate impact assessments in SME lending. We argue that while the dual bottom-line orientation of regional banks in Germany precludes them from applying simple positive or negative screenings, their in-depth knowledge about local clients and circumstances enables them to be active and engaging partners for the green transformation of SMEs. Nonetheless, we explain why developing solutions to utilise this knowledge for climate finance by integrating climate impact assessments into routine lending processes remains a particularly challenging task.

Description: Various electricity generation technologies using different primary energy sources are available. Many published studies compare the costs of these technologies. However, most of those studies only consider plant-level costs and do not fully take into account additional costs that societies may face in using these technologies. This article reviews the literature on the costs of electricity generation technologies, aiming to determine which types of costs are relevant from a societal point of view when comparing generation technologies. The paper categorises the relevant types of costs, differentiating between plant-level, system and external costs as the main categories. It discusses the relevance of each type of cost for each generation technology. The findings suggest that several low-carbon electricity generation technologies exhibit lower social costs per kWh than the currently dominant technologies using fossil fuels. More generally, the findings emphasise the importance of taking not only plant-level costs, but also system and external costs, into account when comparing electricity generation technologies from a societal point of view. The article intends to inform both policymakers and energy system modellers, the latter who may strive to include all relevant types of costs in their models.

Description: The transition to a greener and more circular economy has been a European policy priority for several years. The Circular Economy Action Plan of 2020 underlines the ambition. The following EEA initiatives are meant to support the transition process: - Bellagio Process on circular economy monitoring principles (EPA network); - Enhancement of EEA indicators on circular economy (ETC/WMGE); - Explorative work on novel data streams (FWC); - Co-creation work - knowledge sharing of monitoring experience (ETC/Eionet). The scope of the present task was to report on the co-creation process that was undertaken at the end of 2020. The co-creation process was organised to identify: (i) best practices on monitoring strategies, data sources and target setting; and (ii) areas of circularity measuring and monitoring that remain challenging and require additional investment. The co-creation process partially built on the work done during the Bellagio Process/Initiative which was run in parallel. This ETC report presents and documents the evidence gathered throughout the co- creation process as well as providing a retrospective analysis of the links to the Bellagio Principles.

Description: Since the majority of network concession contracts in Germany were set to expire some time between 2005 and 2016, a window of opportunity arose in which to rebuild and remunicipalise the local energy supply. As a result, 72 new local power companies were established in Germany within the space of just seven years (between early 2005 and late 2012). This paper provides an introduction to the topic of establishing municipal utilities in Germany. The findings were identified on the basis of the comprehensive screening of all newly established municipal utilities in Germany. Our analysis provides information about regional concentration, the size of municipalities, the legal forms of the newly founded municipal public utilities and the role of strategic partnerships. The key findings are that remunicipalisation is not a question of size and that knowledge gaps may be closed by entering into close strategic partnerships.