Centre of social and psychological sciences SAS
Topic
National decarbonisation targets and regional implications: Analysis of regional resilience, socio-economic factors and possibilities for interventions.
PhD. program
Year of admission
2024
Name of the supervisor
Mgr. Richard Filčák, MSc. PhD.
Contact:
Receiving school
Fakulta sociálnych a ekonomických vied UK
Annotation
The transition to a carbon-neutral economy, which is planned in the EU by 2050, requires radical changes at the national and regional level. In its eighth Cohesion Report (European Commission 2022), it identified a set of challenges including demographic change, climate change, technological change and globalisation. These will affect regions and territories unevenly, leading to new disparities between Member States and between their regions. Each region has a different level of resistance to change, which is related to its historical development and socio economic situation. In principle, we can distinguish between two dimensions of regional resilience (Boschma 2015). The first dimension concerns the ability of regions to cope with and cushion the negative effects of various shocks, such as economic crises, climate change, digitization (automation of jobs) or pandemics (such as COVID). The second dimension of regional resilience concerns the ability of regions to take advantage of new opportunities, which also bring with them shocks. For example, climate change encourages innovation, new investment and opens up new job opportunities in a wide range of activities such as water management, waste treatment, new energy sources (such as solar and wind energy), etc. Some regions have better potential than others to use such opportunities and develop new activities (industry, technology, jobs). The work will focus on investigating the following research questions: 1. What factors influence and will influence regions in successfully diversifying in the field of new, innovative technologies and incorporating innovations into their economic and social development? 2. What and how must the cohesion policy (domestic and European financial interventions) take into account in order to support the regions on this path and increase their resilience and ability to respond to emerging challenges? 2. How can the state support broad-spectrum decarbonization and at the same time address the potential negative impact of factors such as globalization or automation?