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Although climate change risks have been studied for a number of economic sectors, banking has received relatively little attention. The paper proposes a methodology and an associated decision-support tool for quantifying, in monetary terms, the risks for banks from the exposure of their loan recipients and/or applicants to climate change. The framework and tool are applied to a case study based on input from a Greek bank; results indicate that climate change risks for banks are considerable, and thus decision makers need to estimate their magnitude and possibly consider these within the credit management process, and in environmental planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the application of the travel cost method for estimating consumer surpluses and total values attributed to the Poseidon temple in Sounio, Greece, is presented. The monument in question is one of the most important archaeological sites in Greece, built in the middle of the 5th century BC. The implementation of the method was supported by a survey of the visitors of the monument, through the completion of an appropriately designed questionnaire with personal interviews. The results of the analysis show that the consumer surplus for visiting the Poseidon temple ranges from € 1.5–24.5 million per year, giving useful insights for the amount of money that are socially acceptable to be spent by the Greek state for the protection and maintenance of the monument. Treatment of travel costs associated with multipurpose trips as well as the type of functional form used to estimate how travel costs influence visitation rates, seem to be the two most important parameters affecting the final results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of COVID-19 have had devasting effects on both health and economies in 2020. At the same time, the lockdown and the downturn of economic activity resulted in a decrease in energy consumption and an accompanying reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. In this article, a comparison with the temperature adjustment of energy use is presented for the main carriers of electricity, natural gas, and oil products in the residential, tertiary, industry, and transport (road transport, domestic aviation, and navigation) sectors in 2020 against the previous two years in Greece, along with the corresponding emissions. As the comparison covers the entire year, both COVID peaks in the March–April and November–December periods and the corresponding lockdown effects as well as seasonal variations are included. The analysis shows a reduction, adjusted for temperature, of 3528 GWh in electricity and 10,286 GWh in transport, and an increase of 1916 GWh in heating and other final uses for a net 11,898 GWh decrease and a resulting emissions reduction of 3.48 MtCO2eq (1.29 MtCO2eq in electricity, 2.69 MtCO2eq in transport, and an increase of 0.54 MtCO2eq in heating), or 4.1%, from total national emissions in 2019. The effect is, to a considerable extent, the result of drastic tourist activity contraction, which is starkly evident in the electricity consumption in the Aegean islands. The comparison between the two lockdown periods brings out clear differences, with the reduction in the second one being considerably smaller as the population reverted, to a large extent, to pre-COVID behavior, which implies that no permanent gains from the COVID long-term impact toward decarbonization should be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study performs a model-based multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) for supporting policy makers in Greece, in designing energy-efficiency policies through the selection of the most effective measures, towards sustainable development. The impact assessment of energy-efficiency measures is based on their macroeconomic, environmental and social implications. Such an evaluation of a quite large number of energy-efficiency measures, regarding both the building and the transport sector and based also on the combination of PROMETHEE and SIMOS methods while performing a sensitivity analysis, is not available in the international literature. The analysis deploys three energy-efficiency co-benefits, derived from energy models and input-output analysis, as well as the cost-effectiveness and the technical feasibility of each measure. This combination of MCDA with input-output analysis is another innovation of the study. The final ranking revealed that, generally, measures in buildings are more effective than those in transportation, while significant differentiations between residential and commercial buildings emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]