An international research team traces the path to support the Paris Agreement climate goal, address climate change and achieve sustainable development simultaneously. On Nature Climate Change, an article with the contribution of the researchers of the CMCC Foundation and CMCC@Ca’Foscari.

LECCE, 26 March 2019 – Each country, region, city or private firm can curb greenhouse gases emissions with measures aligned with socio-economic priorities while supporting the sustainable development agenda. The last issue of Nature Climate Change presents a handbook that shows the required steps towards this objective.
The authors, member of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways (DDP) network, show how to build concretely, in different national contexts, strategies towards zero emissions that go hand-in-hand with sustainable development.

Among the researchers involved in this international study, Ramiro Parrado, CMCC researcher at CMCC@Ca’Foscari, the new research center on climate change of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and RFF – CMCC – European Institute on Economics and the Environment.
“The paper”, researcher Ramiro Parrado explains, “is the result of the contribution of the several research teams that participated to the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) and reviews a research realized in the lead up to COP21 to develop decarbonization pathways for 16 countries.”

Henri Waisman, lead for DDP initiative at IDDRI, first author of the paper, says: “In all the countries we have analysed, we have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve “deep decarbonization” by 2050, and to do so in a way that meets each country’s socio-economic priorities. Based on lessons learnt from this scientific work, this paper describes our framework for pathway design, which could be widely adopted by countries developing their strategies to meet global climate goals.”

The key methodological challenges identified”, Ramiro adds, “are: i) taking into account the key uncertainties affecting a specific country under consideration, ii) providing quantitative assessments based on flexible and inclusive modelling approaches, iii) ensuring the comparability of assessments across countries and iv) using an iterative pathways design to identify the options for the decarbonization of the economy. All these elements are combined in an integrated framework for pathways design, encouraging stakeholder communication and learning, enabling the assessment of compliance with national development and global emissions goals, and providing concrete support to policy formation in the context of the Paris Agreement.”

This will have important implications for the revision of all countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in 2020, and the formal stocktake under the UNFCCC in 2023.

The article is available on Nature Climate Change:
A pathway design framework for national low greenhouse gas emission development strategies
Henri Waisman, Chris Bataille, Harald Winkler, Frank Jotzo, Priyadarshi Shukla, Michel Colombier, Daniel Buira, Patrick Criqui, Manfred Fischedick, Mikiko Kainuma, Emilio La Rovere, Steve Pye, George Safonov, Ucok Siagian, Fei Teng, Maria-Rosa Virdis, Jim Williams, Soogil Young, Gabrial Anandarajah, Rizaldi Boer, Yongsun Cho, Amandine Denis-Ryan, Subash Dhar, Maria Gaeta, Claudio Gesteira, Ben Haley, Jean-Charles Hourcade, Qiang Liu, Oleg Lugovoy, Toshihiko Masui, Sandrine Mathy, Ken Oshiro, Ramiro Parrado, Minal Pathak, Vladimir Potashnikov, Sascha Samadi, David Sawyer, Thomas Spencer, Jordi Tovilla & Hilton Trollip
Nature Climate Change 9, 261–268 (2019)

The CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change
The CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) is a non-profit research institution aimed at investigating and modelling our climate system and its interactions with society and the environment to guarantee reliable, rigorous, and timely scientific results to stimulate sustainable growth, protect the environment, and to develop science driven adaptation and mitigation policies in a changing climate.
The CMCC research network has offices in Lecce, Bologna, Capua, Milan, Sassari, Venice, and Viterbo. Institutions from the public sector are mainly involved but private institutions also participate. These jointly investigate multidisciplinary topics related to climate change science and research.
CMCC’s scientific activities are distributed among nine research divisions which share different knowledge and skills in the field of climate science:
ASC – Advanced Scientific Computing; CSP – Climate Simulations and Predictions; ECIP – Economic analysis of Climate Impacts and Policy; IAFES – Impacts on Agriculture, Forests and Ecosystem Services; ODA – Ocean modeling and Data Assimilation; OPA – Ocean Predictions and Applications; RAAS – Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategies; REMHI – Regional Models and geo-Hydrological Impacts; SEME – Sustainable Earth Modelling Economics.

CMCC@Ca’Foscari
CMCC@Ca’Foscari is the new research center on climate change of Ca’Foscari University of Venice, the result of a strategic partnership between Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change. Thanks to the sharing of resources and skills of these two organizations, CMCC@Ca’Foscari is today the most important climate research center developed by an Italian university.
Based at VEGA – Venice Science and Technology Park, the multidisciplinary task force set up within CMCC@Ca’Foscari includes climatologists, economists, chemists and statisticians, who carry out national and international research on the interaction between the climate, the environment, the economy and society. Read more.