Policies and decisions designed to have a favorable impact on the environment can end up having measurable, non-positive consequences on other aspects of our lives, and on the lives of communities in remote areas if the process is not properly governed. These interdependencies are among the topics studied by Bocconi’s GREEN research center.

Maurizio Malpede, a GREEN Fellow, has done some extensive research about the undesirable social aspects of intensive cobalt mining. In his article The Dark Side of Batteries: Cobalt Mining and Children’s Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo he describes some very negative consequences of cobalt extraction on the already suffering populations of Eastern Congo, where more than half of the world’s output of the mineral originates.

The GREEN research center is actively investigating other areas of resource management as well. The center’s director, Marco Percoco, has published a number of papers on the acceptability of Milan’s road pricing scheme and its effects respectively on pollution levels, traffic composition, rents.

Another less immediately obvious take on green policies was the political effect of Milan’s Area B, that is the ban of older and more polluting cars from the city, studied by professors Italo Colantone, Livio Di Lonardo and Marco Percoco, along with Yotam Margalit from Tel Aviv.

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