Patricia Urban is a Researcher in the Energy, Resources and Climate Change unit at CEPS.
Patricia’s main expertise relates to the area of sustainable development in an EU context, with a focus on sustainable production and consumption as well as social inequality. In addition, her research interests have revolved around interactions of socioeconomic and ecological systems, such as environmental impacts of human activities and effects of climate change on agri-food supply chains.
Monitoring sustainable development in the EU: Patricia has three years of academic research experience in evaluating the EU’s progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To analyse SDG trends and Member States’ relative status regarding the 2030 Agenda, she quantitatively evaluated sustainable development indicator trends. Within this field, she co-authored and co-edited Monitoring Reports for Eurostat and supported the development of additional methodologies. In this context, she performed quantitative spillover analyses of EU consumption on other parts of the world and investigated trends in decoupling resource use from environmental impacts. Investigating synergies and tradeoffs between the SDGs, she combined correlation analysis with qualitative expert judgement analysis, resulting in a peer-reviewed journal publication.
Climate change effects on agri-food supply chains: To investigate how climate change and extreme weather events impact different stages of the food system, Patricia conducted an in-depth literature review of different disaster modelling approaches. In addition, she performed a multi-regional input-output analysis for her Master thesis, assessing counterfactual climate-change induced crop yield losses and resulting impacts on final products consumed in the EU.
Climate neutrality in EU regions: For a publication commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development, Patricia co-authored a study on requirements for a successful transformation towards a climate neutral future at regional level in the EU. In this context, she conducted interviews with policymakers, co-organised expert workshops and, jointly with the other partners, evaluated the outcomes to provide concrete policy recommendations for supporting the transition to climate neutrality across EU regions.
