Events

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Malte Toetzke

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Meeting global climate goals will require a significant increase in the amount of finance flowing towards activities that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yet the landscape of mechanisms available to finance mitigation is increasingly complex. From carbon credits and results-based payments to concessional and blended finance, green bonds and emerging impact bonds, different instruments seek to mobilize capital for climate action in fundamentally different ways. Understanding these differences is increasingly important. Carbon finance typically links payments to quantified emissions reductions or removals, including through carbon credits, while the broader field of climate finance encompasses a much wider range of public and private financial flows supporting the transition. Each approach presents different opportunities, risks and questions around environmental integrity, financial additionality, scalability and accountability.

This public session hosted by the Max Planck Institute’s Net Zero Lab will provide an accessible introduction to this rapidly evolving landscape. Beginning with a Carbon Finance vs Climate Finance 101, it will then bring together experts for two panels. The first will examine the opportunities and pitfalls of using carbon credits to finance mitigation. The second will look beyond carbon markets to explore the wider climate-finance toolbox, including blended finance, results-based approaches and climate and impact bonds. The goal is to provide participants with a practical understanding of how different financial mechanisms can channel capital towards climate mitigation, where each works best, and how they might complement one another in financing the transition to net zero.

Event entry on the Munich Climate Week calendar

Contact person: Injy Johnstone

Join us for an open office with the Net Zero Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Learn about our work on the policies, governance, and market mechanisms needed to accelerate the transition to net zero, including decarbonization, climate tech innovation, and carbon markets. Meet our researchers, hear about our latest projects, and exchange ideas on some of the most pressing challenges in climate policy today. Whether you work on climate, study it, or are simply curious, we invite you to come by and connect!

Event entry on the Munich Climate Week calendar

Contact person: Injy Johnstone

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Jordan Bisset

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Registration
 

Call for Participation

This expert workshop invites scholars and practitioners to explore the legal, regulatory, and policy implications of what we term the editable world, a socio-technical condition in which the physical environment becomes subject to real-time computational rendering.

Digital infrastructures are no longer confined to screens, platforms, or online spaces. With the rapid development of spatial computing, extended reality (XR), and AI-enabled wearable devices, digital systems are becoming embedded directly into perception, mobility, and everyday encounters. Streets, classrooms, workplaces, public institutions, and civic spaces are turning phygital: hybrid environments in which physical reality is continuously annotated, filtered, augmented, and personalized through computational layers.

While existing research and regulation have focused extensively on digital platforms, online discourse, and data governance, far less attention has been paid to environments where digital systems no longer merely mediate communication, but actively interfere with seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world. In such contexts, perception itself becomes a site of intervention; public space becomes physically shared but also digitally customized; and longstanding conceptual distinctions between online and offline, public and private, infrastructure and interface begin to erode.

The workshop starts from the premise that editable reality is not a speculative future scenario. It is already emerging through prototypes, pilot deployments, design choices, and regulatory blind spots. At the same time, the idea of “editing the world” is not entirely new. Humans have always curated their environments socially, culturally, and spatially, by forming communities, choosing neighborhoods, and shaping boundaries of belonging and exclusion. What distinguishes the editable world today is a new mode of curation: one that operates through real-time perceptual mediation, individualized algorithmic layers, and continuous computational rendering of physical reality. Editing shifts from visible, collective, and slow-moving social practices to individualized, adaptive, and often opaque interventions embedded directly into perception.

This transformation raises urgent questions for law, policy, and governance. Who governs phygital spaces when digital layers are controlled by private platforms while physical spaces remain subject to public law? How should legal systems conceptualize public space when it is no longer a singular, stable entity, or uniformly shared? What happens to legal notions of privacy, dignity, autonomy, and consent when perception itself becomes a site of data extraction, inference, nudging, and, in particular in the context of digital sexualized violence, abuse? And how can democratic accountability be preserved when citizens inhabit different versions of the same physical environment?
These dynamics expose a growing governance vacuum, in which public law regimes governing physical space coexist uneasily with privately governed digital layers that increasingly structure visibility, access, and behaviour.

The workshop also recognizes that the editable world is shaped by economic incentives and political economy. Much like the early Internet, phygital environments risk a trajectory from openness toward enclosure, as proprietary business models, monetization of perception, and platorm-based gatekeeping reshape access to and participation in physical public space. This raises familiar yet unresolved questions about power asymmetries, privatization of shared infrastructures, and the role of competition, data, and intellectual property law in governing perceptual environments.

About humanet3

humanet3 is an interdisciplinary research group which analyzes, deconstructs, and contributes to initiatives aiming at a human-centered digital transformation, as proposed by the European Union in its ‘European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade’. humanet3 is a joint research group established by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Prof. Armin von Bogdandy), the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Prof. Josef Drexl), and the Center for Humans and Machines (CHM) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (Prof. Iyad Rahwan). It is led by Erik Tuchtfeld, further group members are Anna Sophia Tiedeke, Arian Henning, Chaewon Yun, Germán Oscar Johannsen, and Natalie Abel.

Companies across industries assess the (Scope 2) emissions embodied in the electricity they consume by counting renewable energy certificates procured against electricity drawn from the grid. Critics argue that such market-based accounting understates actual emissions by double-counting renewable energy and advocate location-based accounting, which assigns emissions at the average carbon intensity of the local grid. Modeling a competitive electricity market, this paper shows that either accounting method, when applied by all electricity buyers, captures the actual emissions generated. Yet only market-based methods can induce efficient investment in renewable energy, as certificate prices transmit the buyers' willingness to pay for lower emissions to suppliers. Location-based methods suppress this signal and lead to underinvestment. When buyers can choose between the two methods, as they can today, both are used in equilibrium, renewable energy is double counted, and investment is below the efficient level. Standard-setters, now revising their guidance, can prevent this outcome by requiring all buyers to assess any electricity not matched with certificates at the carbon intensity of the local generation left unclaimed, effectively implementing one method.

Contact person: Isabel Haase

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

The Winter School is open both to doctoral researchers within the TransforM Cluster and external researchers.

Participants will:

• attend panels and lectures with our expert researchers,present their current research in peer review sessions,
• take part in site visits (such as to the Deutsches Museum)
• attend networking/social events in the evenings to connect with TransforM Excellence Cluster community.

Over three days, participants in the Winter School will cover these topics and more with our cluster principal investigators and external experts. Participants will receive a certificate from the TransforM Academy and will be credited with up to 4 ECTS credits.

Submission deadline: 1 September 2026
Notification of acceptance: 21 September 2026

Full information in the TransforM website.

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Manfredi Aliberti

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

On 14/15 December 2026, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 9^th Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop (RISE9), an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Postdocs in Economics and Management. 

The goal of the RISE9 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Postdocs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.
 

For more information see RISE Workshop.