In 2016, more than 30 complementary local currencies circulated in France. Today, there are more than fifty. In order to define the scope of its intervention and the expectations of local currencies project promoters, the ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency) wanted to assess the contribution of these currencies to the ecological and energy transition of the territories and their potential for development.
Vertigo Lab, together with three experts, including the TAOA association specialized in local currencies, accompanied ADEME to carry out an inventory of complementary environmental currencies. The first stage of our mission was to develop a panorama of these currencies at the international level. In a second step, we analyzed their environmental impacts and their economic efficiency in relation to conventional public environmental measures.
This study reveals that although the environmental and economic impacts of complementary environmental currencies are for now measurable on a microeconomic scale only, these currencies constitute interesting levers for the implementation of ecological transition programs.
