Since I’m attending the International Symposium for Climate Finance and Sustainability (ISCFS) today and tomorrow, I thought it’d be nice to share some of the things I learned. Today and tomorrow, I will start with a reflection on the conference as a research gathering, and then give you my top5 learnings of the day.
The dominance of quantitative research and misaligned worldviews
My first observation, already after the third morning presentation, is that doing statistical analysis is really cool. The format is similar: I have this hypothesis, I take this data, there’s a correlation that is statistically significant, so this is true. 😎
Following from that, my second observation is that qualitatively investigating whether the thing you concluded with all these numbers is not so cool. 😕❌
A lot of researchers look at the world as almost separate from themselves, not even considering the possibility of asking someone in the domain that they are researching whether their conclusions could be true!
Honestly, I find this very disappointing and scary even, because we are setting ourselves up for disconnecting ourselves from reality and, more crucially, making policy recommendations that are based on a world that might not be ‘true.’
I am a bit baffled by the fact that journals don’t maintain any minimum requirements for validating statistical analysis. As scientists, we should be doing our absolute best to find out the truth, not hide from it behind our screens.
Cool facts
Life hack: when one of the presentors has to chair a session, schedule them to have the last presentation in the slot. When you do that, they have a strong incentive to make sure the prior presentations do not take more time. 🧠
In the Netherlands, licence plates are connected to the car, in other countries (e.g. Belgium and Germany), they are connected to the driver.
For the second-hand market of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), we should require the disclosure of a measure of the state of the battery alongside things like age or mileage. Currently, when these cars are sold on the second-hand market, people assume the worst for the battery quality, driving down the prices of second-hand BEVs substantially.
Carbon assurance is the act of hiring an independent entity to check reported CO2 emissions. There is a statistical correlation between the amount of woman on a company board and the likelihood that this company would initiate a carbon assurance inquiry. Although I wonder if this is because of the woman in the board or because these companies have a different corporate culture that coincidentally also has the effect to have more women in higher positions. But yea… Statistics don’t tell us this…
Increased hot and cold spikes hurt the visits to small businesses and consequently their sales. Since these small businesses have little back-up cash, many such spikes in a short period of time can cause them to go bankrupt. The latter part is not the case for big retail chains. Consequently, increased extreme weather events, like heat or cold shocks, will re-balance the markt in favour of big corporations.
