Nick Evans

Nick Evans is a Fellow at Ecologic Institute. His work focuses on the evaluation of European and international climate governance systems and their effect on and connection to national actions. Further research interests include behavioral economics, sustainable consumption behavior and the psychology of climate change communication. Additionally, he helps coordinate Ecologic Institute's efforts on transatlantic topics and serves as Ecologic Institute's liaison to the Konrad von Moltke fund. He is a native English speaker and also works in German.

At Ecologic Institute, Nick Evans works on a range of research projects, dealing with national and EU Member State climate governance. His recent work has investigated specific governance features, such as long-term planning for climate neutrality, climate advisory bodies, and climate framework laws. As part of the team of researchers behind the European Climate Neutrality Observatory, Nick Evans was lead author of the chapter on EU governance in the first annual flagship report published in June 2023. Moreover, Nick Evans co-authored a study entitled, "Policy Consistency: What it means, how to measure it, and links with other processes" on the implementation of the EU Climate Law, which investigates new monitoring processes introduced by the law on the consistency of EU and national measures with the 2050 climate neutrality target.

Nick Evans' work on national level climate governance includes a first-of-its-kind assessment of EU Member State long-term climate strategies that was published in 2022 as well as the management of Ecologic Institute's Climate Framework Laws Info-Matrix, which is an online resource on the status and substance of these legislative instruments in European countries. Furthermore, he was lead author of a 2021 study commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA) that investigates the landscape of national climate change advisory bodies in Europe and serves as input for a dialogue workshop for the representatives of such bodies from across the continent. In January 2020, he supported a research project funded by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) that systematically analyzes the climate laws in nine EU Member States. The resulting report, entitled "Climate Laws in Europe: Good Practices in Net-Zero Management," was widely disseminated and translated into multiple languages.

For the project, "Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment of EU Member State Low Carbon Development Strategies (MaxiMiseR)", Nick Evans helped develop an indicator-based web tool for the evaluation of EU Member States' long-term climate strategies. The tool was then used by the WWF European Policy Office (EPO) for a comprehensive report comparing long-term climate ambition in select countries. He is also involved with Ecologic Institute's educational programs and taught a seminar section on behavioral change and sustainable consumption at the Duke University (US) summer study abroad program.

In years prior, Nick Evans worked as an independent researcher for Ecologic Institute on numerous projects and was previously employed both as a Transatlantic Fellow supported by a German Academic Exchange Service grant (October 2014 to July 2015) and as a student intern (February 2013 to June 2013).