Project description
Investigating the risks of climate adaptation lock-ins
While climate adaptation technologies help sustain industries, there is also the danger that the same technologies may delay the transition to an economic system that is sustainable. This is why it is important that industries do not compromise on sustainability. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the AMT project looks at the winter-sports industry in the Dolomites mountain range, in north-eastern Italy, where artificial snow-making has become quite common in this region. The project will explore the issue of how industries get locked into unsustainable practices that are profitable. Its goal is to support sustainable transitions by offering insights for the European Green Deal and climate resilience policies.
Objective
As economies must decarbonise by 2050, international accords growing rely on firms’ capacity to innovate for both mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (coping with inevitable impacts). Yet these two strategies, generally treated as complementary, can undermine each other: effective, technology-led adaptation to nature’s shifts can dull the pressure to decarbonise, creating a “climate–innovation conundrum” that fuels long-term risk. As in alpine tourism, where artificial snow has become the main way of surviving, adaptation technologies can offset short-term losses but lock industries and communities into unsustainable and unexplored spirals. Management research is increasingly seen as vital to this debate.
With AMT, I will investigate when and why climate innovation can backfire on resilience. AMT will: (1) map how a climate-exposed industry navigates adaptation–mitigation trade-offs and the cognitive dynamics driving entrenchment; (2) theorize the consequences of such entrenchment by identifying lock-ins and developing the construct of climate-exposed expiring industries—profitable yet physically unsustainable sectors; and (3) co-produce an actionable toolkit with stakeholders to guide transition.
Empirically, I will study the snow-dependent winter-sports industry in the south-facing Dolomites—already >3 °C warmer than pre-industrial levels—an early-warning laboratory where adaptation technologies matured early. With Italy now a leader in snowmaking innovation—and 90% of its slopes already reliant on artificial snow—the setting offers a compelling preview of the trade-offs other sectors are likely to face globally. Hosted at Oxford Saïd (Prof. Juliane Reinecke) with a secondment at King’s Business School (Prof. Paolo Aversa), the fellowship will provide me advanced methods and a cross-sector network. It will advance my path towards EU leadership in sustainable business research and deliver actionable insights for the EU Green Deal and a just transition.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom
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