The current economic and environmental situation poses fundamental questions that this book aims to answer: Under which conditions could a market-based approach contribute to a decrease in emissions? How are abatement and investment strategies generated or promoted under permit regimes like the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS)? In the context of the EU ETS, what is the trade-off between production, technological changes and pollution? This book is intended to provide students and practitioners the knowledge and theoretical tools they need in order to answer these and other more general questions in the context of so-called environmental finance theory, a new field of research that investigates the economic, financial and managerial impacts of market-based environmental policies.

Marc Chesney holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Geneva and obtained his habilitation from the Sorbonne University. He is currently Professor of Finance and Vice-Director of the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich where he created the Environmental Finance course. He is an expert in quantitative finance (real options) and environmental economics. He was previously Professor and Associate Dean at HEC Paris.Jonathan Gheyssens is finishing his PhD in Economics at the NADEL Center for Development and Cooperation at the ETH Zurich and is a research assistant under Prof. Chesney's chair at the Institut for Banking and Finance, University of Zurich. His researches are focused on real options, environmental and climate economics and REDD schemes. He has been teaching the Environmental Finance course at the University of Zurich with Prof. Chesney for the past four years.Luca Taschini is a Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Senior Dahrendorf Research Fellow at LSE. He works mostly on the theory of market-based instruments, energy economics and technology change. In the climate and energy policy arena, he has published articles on designing cap-and-trade programs,  technology policies, and the Clean Development Mechanism. Luca holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich and is also a Fellow of the CESifo research network. He previously hold a visiting scholar position at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.