The impact of the open eco-innovation mode on employment: the case of Italian network business agreements

The renewed interest in low-carbon development, in the face of the growing frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events, is calling for the use of systems approaches to policymaking. The outcomes of climate action are many and varied. First, climate mitigation reduces current costs, enabling growth by making available resources for new investments. Second, adaptation has the potential to reduce future costs and trigger growth through the reallocation of resources that would have been destined for emergency responses. Both investments generate indirect and induced economic outcomes by reducing externalities (e.g., health impact from air pollution) and curbing the risk of future climate-related damage by increasing adaptive capacity. Systems approaches are required to effectively assess the multi-faceted outcomes of these investments. The use of the Green Economy Model (GEM) is proposed, as a way of performing knowledge integration, using a multi-stakeholder approach based on model co-creation. GEM addresses the main pitfalls of mainstream models, being narrowly focused on sectoral or thematic dynamics. It further allows for the estimation of policy and investment outcomes from a societal point of view, by accounting for the economic valuation of externalities in economic and financial analysis. Results of applications of the model at national, provincial, local and asset levels show that low-carbon investments are economically viable and generate considerable societal value.