讲座预告| Can the sharing economy help combat climate change and promote sustainable societies?

讲座时间：9月9日（周日）9：00-10：00

讲座地点：25教学楼A区3A教室

主讲人：D’Maris Coffman

主讲人简介：

Dr. D’Maris Coffman joined UCL in September 2014 as a Senior Lecturer in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at CPM here at UCL Bartlett. In February 2017, she was appointed as Interim Director (Head of Department) of BSCPM. In late January 2018, she was appointed to a professorial chair in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment with effect from March 2018.

Before coming to UCL, she spent six years as a fellow of Newnham College, as a college lecturer and teaching fellow, and a Leverhulme ECF. In July 2009, she started the Centre for Financial History, where she directed through December 2014. It is still going strong, but she has moved from Newnham College to Darwin College in line with the affiliation of its new director.

She did her undergraduate training at the Wharton School in managerial and financial economics and her PhD in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Whle at Penn, her doctoral research in the UK was funded in part by the Mellon Foundation under the guise of an IHR pre-doctoral fellowship and an SSRC international dissertation fellowship.

Professor Coffman’s research interests span infrastructure, construction, real estate and climate change.

讲座内容：

The greatest barrier to achieve the UN Global Goals is the need for simultaneous improvement of both ecological and economic efficiency. Too often policymakers see these as conflicting priorities, which makes it impossible to accomplish the scale of economic and social change required. Dr Zhifu Mi and I argue that the sharing economy offers the potential to promote the needed shifts in collective consumption behavior that will deliver both economic efficiency and greener growth. However, the sharing economy is not intrinsically sustainable and there is considerable debate how far specific solutions (bike sharing, car sharing and flat sharing) actually deliver reduced carbon emissions, greener growth, or public health benefits in their current forms. New research is in desperately need.

Most advocates of the sharing economy are entrepreneurial start-ups that embrace the rhetoric of ‘disrupting the old economy’ in order to unlock cheaper options for consumer behavior. These new business models offer both opportunities and challenges for governments, which will require a renewed commitment on the part of public authorities. We conclude that states can effectively regulate, incentivize and protect promising enterprises that pass a Life Cycle Assessment test aligned with principles of Corporate Social Responsibility. We argue that this is the best way to harness the sharing economy for a variety of pro-social goals.