The international network aims at facing climate change sharing the most innovative knowledge towards a low carbon society and a low carbon consumption.

LCS-RNet, the International Research Network for Low Carbon Societies, presented in Trieste, is an international network integrating researches and knowledge from six different countries,  a starting point for a group destined to become more and more numerous, opening its membership to developed and developing countries in order  to integrate opportunities, projects and aspirations.
CMCC and ENEA are the Italian members of the working group which will first officially meet in October 2009 in Bologna.

Scientific knowledge is fundamental to face climate change and build a society less dependent on carbon, but it’s not enough. Concrete results can only be achieved through a widespread, public awareness of climate change, involving both industrialized countries and developing countries, like China and India,  in a common working group.
This is the core idea LCS-RNet comes from, a network now composed by 10 of the most important research institutes on climate change. The international network is an open group willing to grow up and integrate those who will show competences and commitment to sharing the same multidisciplinary goals, putting together scientific research knowledge and political, economic, social and environmental systems.

LCS-RNet’s work will generate meetings and initiatives in order to achieve an ongoing dialogue which involves all the decision makers,   the business community and the citizenship, starting from the scientific competences of each member institute.
LCS-RNet’s activities will follow three main guidelines.
The first one will focus on the developing of a cooperative research and exchange of information system among the member institutes, in order to activate a circuit of knowledge in the field of climate change. The second guideline will lead to the organization of moments of constructive confrontation and exchange between different players which are not part of the scientific community, considering all the subjects involved in some way in climate choices, coming from various areas, from politics to the economy, from social sciences to energy markets, from the public sector to private businesses. The third working direction aims at stimulating a policymaking process for climate change, providing scientific results and recommendations to international decision makers.

Furthermore, over the next five years, LCS-RNet seeks the implementation of scenarios and models for a low-carbon society, the formulation of interdisciplinary perspectives towards the goals of this initiative, the spreading of the knowledge needed to build and anchor, also outside the scientific community, the awareness of the benefits a low-carbon society can assure.

The idea, formulated in Kobe in 2008, during the official meeting of the Ministers of Environment at the Japanese G8, has now found a concrete perspective in Trieste, at the International Forum on low-emissions and low-carbon technologies. The international meeting was a first step towards the Environmental G8 which will take place in Siracusa from the 22nd to the 24th of April 2009, coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Environment Land and Sea, in collaboration with CMCC.
The meeting held in Trieste was concluded on April the 3rd with the official launch of the LCS-RNEt network, after a contribution of the Italian Ministry, promoter and supporter of the initiative, which prepared the draft document of the conference as a starting point for the negotiation process. 

LCS-RNet is currently composed (for Italy) by the Euro-Mediterrenean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) and by the Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA); from the French Institutes Academy of Technologies (Academie des Technologies),  Agency of the Environment and Energy (Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Énergie ADEME) and the Institute for  Sustainable Development and International Reltions (Institut du Développement Durable et des Relations Internationales IDDRI), from the German Wuppertal Institut für Klima Umwelt Energie GmbH; from the Japanese National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) and Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES); from the Korean National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER) and from the British UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).