I am a lucky man: I can spend my time and energy on something I believe in, and I think that this is a fair definition of happiness, at least in professional life. I help organise a conference on carbon content measurement, my research topic, and I know that it can make a large difference.
Together with the IMF, the BIS, Eurostat, the Central Bank of Chile and the University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, the Bundesbank is organizing a workshop on “Carbon content measurement for products, organizations and aggregates: creating a sound basis for decision making.” Here is a link to the conference website.
The concept of this workshop is novel in two ways. First, the center stage will not be occupied by pre-prepared conference papers, but by a set of important questions that await solutions. And around sixty experts will try to come up with good answers. Second, the conference is hybrid in a special way. While the experts will interact personally, the results and the discussions will be broadcasted world-wide, allowing for online participation. Thus it is really two workshops: one is on-site and hands-on, the other is remote and with broad access.
Without feasible and exact carbon content measurement, the efforts to bring emissions down cannot be successful in the end. The workshop will take place on 21-23 February 2023 in Hamburg, in the conference area Deutsche Bundesbank Regional Office in Hamburg. I am looking forward to it, in a very literal sense!