news 2020

Most people underestimate exponential growth, including when it comes to the spread of the coronavirus. The ability to grasp the magnitude of exponential growth depends on the way in which it is communicated. Using the right framing helps to understand the benefit of mitigation measures. The coronavirus outbreak offered the public a crash course in statistics, with terms like doubling time, logarithmic scales, R factor, rolling averages, and excess mortality now on everyone's tongue.

UNIGE psychologists are analysing the way our minds plan the use of resources so that interventions can be developed to reduce excessive energy consumption and carbon emissions. Mental accounting is a concept that describes the mental processes we employ to organise our resource use. Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked.

The growth of trade generates economic expansion, but can also result in an increase in long-term unemployment depending on the sectors of activity that are developing, stress UNIGE economists. What is the impact of increasing international trade on the labour market? This question is at the heart of many political debates, but it has long been absent from international economics textbooks.

Lorenz Keysser believes that in order to overcome ecological crises, we must recognise affluence as a main driver and fundamentally reconsider our economy and lifestyle. A new mobile phone here, a new dress there, heading on holiday by SUV or further afield by plane, and - for those who can afford it - a big house.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have collaborated with British economists to study how energy consumption by Swiss industry develops depending on energy pricing. To this end, they examined in particular the prices and consumption of both electricity and natural gas over the past decades.

Farmers could increase their revenues by increasing biodiversity on their land. This is the conclusion reached by an interdisciplinary research team including the fields of agricultural sciences, ecology and economics at ETH Zurich and other universities. Many farmers associate grassland biodiversity with lower yields and financial losses.

Next milestone in the commissioning of CHEOPS: After the successful opening of the space telescope cover on January 29, 2020, CHEOPS has now taken its first images of the sky. CHEOPS is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, led by the University of Bern, in collaboration with the University of Geneva.