Champion Spotlight

Behind every successful CO₂ pricing pilot is a person who made it happen. DeCarb-Pro spotlights one practitioner, one project, one story. .


Champion Spotlight — Green Metropolitan Region

Michiel
van der Hagen

Policy Advisor · Green Metropolitan Region

Annual investment

€0.5M

in green energy across GMR municipalities

Climate damage avoided

€30M / yr

a 60× return on investment

Outcome

100%

of GMR municipalities switched to green electricity

The challenge

Making the invisible cost visible

Climate impact is easy to ignore. It lives in the future, feels distant, and carries the convenient label of 'someone else's problem.' Michiel sees this daily: municipalities juggling competing priorities, with carbon consequences perpetually bumped down the agenda.

His starting point was simple but radical — what if you made climate costs visible in the present tense, in euros, today?

The approach

Turning values into numbers

Together with all the local municipalities of the Green Metropolitan Region, Michiel's team ran a pilot calculating the avoided climate damage costs of switching to green energy. They drew on energy consumption reports, CO₂ emission factors, and the Social Cost of Carbon price.

The result: a €0.5 million annual investment avoids €30 million in climate damage costs every year.

Putting the effect in euros made the decision simple.

— Michiel van der Hagen
The impact

A cultural shift, not just a policy win

Every municipality in the GMR chose green electricity. But the bigger shift was cultural: 'green' stopped being a values argument and became a numbers argument.

Advice

For those just getting started

"Just do it. It's not that difficult to calculate the costs once you have insight into your emissions. Yes, there will be debate about the price, but at least you're thinking about long-term effects."

What's next

Spreading the method across regions

Michiel is running trainings, sparking new pilots, gathering more good examples across North-West Europe.

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