Summary

Cities are both significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and acutely vulnerable to climate change. At the same time, they grapple with challenges such as socio-economic inequalities and escalating housing costs. To address these issues, truly transformative policies should simultaneously reduce CO₂ emissions, enhance resilience to rising temperatures, and minimize adverse consequences for households and firms. This project, ClimQSEM, develops a Quantitative Spatial Equilibrium Model (QSEM) for the case of Vienna—an innovative, spatially granular, and integrated modeling framework that explicitly accounts for interdependencies among economic factors, land use, housing prices, and transport-related outcomes. The primary project goal is to identify transformative policies that have the potential to achieve substantial reductions in CO₂ emissions and reduce urban heat islands, while limiting or avoiding undesirable side-effects, such as increased housing costs or deepened socio-economic inequalities.

Duration

Start:

January 2026

Expected end:

December 2028

Consortium

Project partners:

Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Corvinus University of Budapest, GeoSphere Austria (Wien)

Funding

This project is funded by the Climate and Energy Fund and is carried out under the program "ClimQSEM"

Contact

Stefanie Peer

stefanie.peer@wu.ac.at