Climate change poses a double challenge on public budgets: first, ongoing climate change requires public funding of both damage alleviation at a growing scale and of adaptation to limit the materialization of future ones. Second, the globally agreed and nationally pursued greenhouse gas emission mitigation requires a broad set of policies, including public investment in particular in the transformation of infrastructure as well as fiscal instruments to create incentives for industries and private households to foster the low carbon transition at the required pace. In the aftermath of Corona and its budget demands, adequate prioritization in these public expenditures is particularly crucial. The here proposed project develops and applies a framework to evaluate consistent greenhouse gas mitigation pathways under a changing climate that informs for budget prioritization among the various options across mitigation and adaptation, while considering the rise in damage alleviation demands. These pathways are further explored as providing the framework for ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) monitoring schemes of companies and the finance sector, in particular for the adequate evaluation criteria for emission compensation elements. The project identifies whether and if so how the latter can be directed to enhance achieving net-zero emissions most efficiently.
