Research projects

Research

Filtering by: Sustainable Earth Modelling Economics Division

2D4D – Disruptive Digitalization for Decarbonization

Digitalization will fundamentally change all sectors of the European economy in the next decades. At the same time, the EU is committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. These two transformation will undoubtedly affect each other, but the extent to which they will be mutually supporting is currently unknown. Most importantly, there is a danger that the digital transformation will delay the progress towards a net-zero carbon economy. The EU-funded 2D4D project aims at ensuring that the digital transformation is not a barrier to decarbonisation, rather an enabler. The project will identify and measure the decarbonisation consequences of three disruptive digitalisation technologies in hard-to-decarbonise sectors: additive manufacturing in industry, mobility-as-a-service in transportation, and AI in buildings. The project will produce a distinctive data collection to examine the technical and socioeconomic potential of these technologies, enhance decarbonisation narratives and ensure that digital technology supports energy transition.

ACCREU – Assessing Climate Change Risk in EUrope

ACCREU is a project funded by HORIZON Europe RIA (Research and Innovation Action) investigating, in a fully integrated framework, climate change impacts, mitigation, adaptation and prospects for a sustainable social and economic development in the EU. ACCREU will  identify challenges, highlight opportunities and deliver practical solutions to policy making and societal actors at the EU, EU Member State, region and community level to accelerate a just societal transformation towards climate resilience in the short, medium and long term.  

AdJUST – ADVANCING THE UNDERSTANDING OF CHALLENGES, POLICY OPTIONS AND MEASURES TO ACHIEVE A JUST EU ENERGY TRANSITION

AdJUST is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. and carried out by a transdisciplinary European consortium consisting of 9 EU partners, 2 UK associated partners and other 11 EU associated partners. The objectives of AdJUST are to achieve a step change in societal understanding of the distributive repercussions of the transition to climate neutrality, and to identify effective and actively-supported policy interventions to accompany climate action so that no-one is left behind.

CAPABLE – ClimAte Policy AcceptaBiLity Economic framework

CAPABLE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. and carried out by a transdisciplinary European consortium consisting of 10 partner institutions and universities across Europe and is coordinated by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). CAPABLE will provide robust, resilient and actionable recommendations for the design of socially and economically acceptable climate policy measures for 2030 and beyond

CircEUlar – Developing circular pathways for a EU low-carbon transition

CircEUlar is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and carried out by a consortium of 10 European organisations. The CircEUlar project aims to understand the dynamics and levers for societal transformation towards a net-zero emission circular economy. The project will address circularity through three main levers: 1) societal transformation to limit material stock growth through dematerialisation, material efficiency, and a transition to a service-based economy; 2) product lifetime extension through repair, maintenance, resale, reuse, and repurposing of obsolete fossil infrastructures; 3) waste reduction management through collection and treatment systems that optimise reuse and recycling. The project considers three focus areas for deep-dive empirical and modelling analysis, integrated into economy-wide modelling frameworks and pathways assessment: digitalisation, mobility and buildings and household services.

CircoMod: Circular Economy Modelling for Climate Change Mitigation

CircoMod is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme and carried out by a consortium of 12 European organizations. The project aims at developing a new generation of advanced models and scenarios that will assess how CE can reduce future GHGs and material use. The project brings together a unique consortium of leading research teams from different disciplines, including industrial ecology and material flow modelling, process-oriented integrated assessment modelling, and macro-economic modelling.  It aims for a breakthrough in integrating CE and GHG mitigation assessments by developing an analytical framework that maps circular economy strategies to existing influential climate scenarios; by providing robust and timely CE data in an open repository; and, by improving the representation of the CE in leading models used by European and global institutions, while strengthening links between the models. These key scientific breakthroughs enable robust scientific assessments in collaboration with stakeholders across policy and industry. 

CO-CREATE: Conditions for Responsible Research of SRM – Analysis, Co-Creation, and Ethos

Experimental research on solar radiation modification (SRM) is controversial and feared to distract from climate change mitigation or lead to dangerous SRM use.  Co-CREATE seeks to help structure this decision problem through co-creative scoping, analysis, and engagement to develop principles and guidelines. Starting with a series of scoping notes that outline key dimensions of experimental SRM research, the project will analyze and develop decision-support tools by asking what we can learn from governance analogues, and how various (risk) evaluation frameworks may help identify key characteristics of research proposals. Furthermore, CO-CREATE itself will enter an extensive stakeholder and rightsholder dialogue that validates preliminary analytical work, ensures stakeholders’ diverse dimensions of concern are included, and strengthens deliberative capacity. Co-CREATE proposes guidelines and principles to facilitate decision-making by the relevant authorities on broader categories of experimental research of SRM and case-by-case decisions.

COMMITTED – Climate pOlicy assessment and Mitigation Modeling to Integrate national and global TransiTion pathways for Environmental-friendly Development

To support the international negotiation process, there must be a good understanding of different outcomes and assumptions between the analytical teams that provide input into the negotiations and/or directly support the development of the low-emission mid-century strategies. In such a situation, negotiators can start from a common understanding of the knowledge base and the associated uncertainties. COMMITTED aims to contribute to both 1) supporting the analytical capacity for national teams to provide analyses of NDCs and long-term mitigation strategies and pathways in Asian countries and 2) creating a robust scientific understanding of the possibilities, sectoral potentials and socioeconomic implications of different countries to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the context of long-term low-emission development strategies and the overall objectives of the Paris Agreement. In the past, model comparison projects and interactions between modelling groups and policymakers have proven to be effective instruments for achieving these goals.

ECEMF – European Climate and Energy Modelling Forum

ECEMF is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme and carried out by a consortium of 15 European and International organizations. The aim of ECEMF is to provide the knowledge to inform the development of future energy and climate policies at national and European levels. In support of this aim, ECEMF proposes a range of activities to achieve five objectives and meet the four challenges set out in the call text. ECEMF’s programme of events and novel IT-based communications channel will enable researchers to identify and codevelop the most pressing policy-relevant research questions with a range of stakeholders to meet ambitious European energy and climate policy goals, in particular the European Green Deal and the transformation to a climate neutral society. Answers will be provided by the first inclusive and open full-scale model comparison exercise on achieving climate neutrality in Europe, including from the outset over 20 models and 15 top research groups, to produce a coherent and relevant evidence-base for energy and climate policy impact assessment. ECEMF’s evidence-base will support the development of policy-relevant insights which will be communicated to and discussed with the key decision makers via a range of novel methods, including interactive embeddable visualization blocks, policy briefs, workshops and high-profile events. This loop of knowledge co-production stands on two pillars. First, ECEMF will advance the state-of-the-art of energy and climate modelling by enabling sharing of: input data using open standards, methods for model comparison building on the vast experience of the consortium, scientific

ELEVATE – Enabling and Leveraging Climate Action Towards Netzero Emissions

ELEVATE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and the consortium consists of 20 partners, and brings together leading research groups to support climate policymaking within and outside the EU. These research groups are involved in modelling international climate policy, national policies, social science, policy analysis, environmental assessment, and stakeholder engagement. World-leading institutions in global integrated assessment modelling are a central part of the ELEVATE consortium (IIASA, PBL, PIK, CMCC, E3M, NIES, KU, UFRJ/COPPETEC, and UMD). This means that the consortium involves all teams that have played a leading role in the coordination and development of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which serve to integrate the assessment of mitigation, adaptation and impacts research across the climate change science community.

EUNICE – Debiasing the uncertainties of climate stabilization ensembles

Mathematical models have become central tools in global environmental assessments. To serve society well, climate change stabilization assessments need to capture the uncertainties of the deep future, be statistically sound and track near-term disruptions. Up to now, conceptual, computational and data constraints have limited the quantification of uncertainties of climate stabilization pathways to a narrow set, focused on the current century. The statistical interpretation of scenarios generated by multi-model ensembles is problematic due to availability biases and model dependencies. Scenario plausibility assessments are scant. Simplified, single-objective decision criteria frameworks are used to translate decarbonization uncertainties into decision rules whose understanding is not validated. 

FIND: Finance and Innovation to couple Negative emissions and sustainable Development

Current global climate action is deeply insufficient to deliver the objectives of the Paris Agreement and containing global warming to 1.5 °C will likely require the deployment of carbon dioxide removals. However, the technologies to sequestrate and store carbon from the atmosphere are currently immature, risky, and highly questioned. Understanding the effective diffusion potential of carbon removal methods and their socioeconomic and environmental impacts is pivotal to design future climate action. FIND will help to develop an innovative framework to assess the feasibility and social desirability of limiting global warming through the diffusion of negative emission technologies. It aims to ensure that negative emission technologies act as an enabler, not a barrier, of long-run sustainable development. The project will evaluate climate and non-climate policies to create robust, no-regret policy portfolios supporting a rapid and sustainable path to a net-zero society. FIND will be of high relevance for public policy and civil society, especially considering Europe’s commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 while spurring green and inclusive growth.

GEOCEP – Global Excellence in Modeling Climate and Energy Policies

GEOCEP is a project on climate and energy policy modelling and an international network for knowledge transfers. GEOCEP identifies institutional and political obstacles to implementing the first-best solutions to control for the global carbon externality and, consequently, investigates an array of second-best energy and climate mitigation policies focused on increasing energy efficiency, on reducing emissions and related environmental and health externalities and on promoting renewable energy. GEOCEP has is funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

GRINS – Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable

The green, digital and sustainable mobility transitions and the associated societal transformations require a far from trivial process of adaptation. The actors of the system, firms, households and public administrations, face complex and changing environments and need to make choices under uncertainty, often under limited information and often facing limitations in their ability to process it and use if proficiently. To respond to these needs – GRINS – Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable Extended Partnership will offer tools to support fundamental and applied research for firms and households and for policy analysis and evaluation of the actions of public administrations. The project is designed following the priorities set by the Italian National Research Plan (PNR) and in strict adherence with the fundamental underline goals that inspire the whole EU-NRRP action: favouring resilient, inclusive, and sustainable growth.

LOCALISED – Localised decarbonisation pathways for citizens, local administrations and businesses to inform for mitigation and adaptation action

LOCALISED is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme and carried out by a consortium of 12 European organisations.  The LOCALISED project pulls together a multidisciplinary consortium that includes experienced research institutions, local city authorities – that will inform the development and testing of the LOCALISED tools, as well as associated partners like Assolombarda, which will provide insights regarding the business sector.

PRISMA – Net zero Pathway Research through Integrated Assessment Model Advancements

Introduction The ambition to achieve the Paris Agreement goals has led to the realization that a rapid and full decarbonization of the economy is required, involving a structural transition of the current economy and society. With the rise of quantified policy targets, policy packages, and consideration of multiple dimensions and sectors, Integrated Assessment Models with their ability to consider complex relationships and provide calibrated numerical results have become ever more important in the last decade. The PRISMA project aims to bring these models to the next level by focusing on four key areas of improvement, namely the representation of distributional justice and efficiency, innovation and finance, climate impacts and land-use implications, and lifestyle change and circularity. In these four key areas we will improve existing large-scale IAMs and sectorial models, and consider the linking of different models where applicable. Two cross-cutting shared themes across these areas are the improvement of the temporal and spatial resolution of the analysis, and the representation of disruptive and structural change in the economy. Notably we will increase the spatial granularity with a focus on Europe, and look at the yearly and in particular near term detailed modeling of rapid decarbonization pathways. The extensive model development will be co-designed through an interactive stakeholder engagement process from the beginning, and focus on model openness and usability to ensure the stakeholder and policy relevance. Moreover, PRISMA will focus in its application on the analysis of the spectrum of Fit for 55 package policies of the EU developing focalized

PRUDENT: Promoting Green Nudging for Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry

PRUDENT aspires to revolutionize agriculture and forestry by promoting sustainable practices and innovative farming technologies. The project will explore the use of “nudges”, small changes in how farmers and foresters make decisions, to encourage them to adopt more sustainable approaches. These nudges will be tested in real-life situations alongside policy changes to see their combined effect on sustainability. Innovative tools, like web or mobile apps, will be developed to help farmers and foresters regulate their actions and make lasting changes, supporting these behaviour changes. Different types of farming and forestry systems across Europe will be studied to understand their unique challenges. The insights gained from this research will create new ways of thinking about agriculture and forestry, including social innovations, business models, and policy recommendations. 

SMOOTH – Sustainable Finance for a Smooth Low-Carbon Transition

The threat of climate change calls for a rapid transition to a low-carbon society. Aligning the financial system with climate stability is a crucial prerequisite for achieving decarbonization while preserving economic prosperity and societal welfare. However, we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of how the institutional and behavioural features of financial systems may affect the speed and shape of the low-carbon transition. Additionally, the coevolving socioeconomic, financial and environmental repercussions of such a large-scale societal transformation have not yet been systematically analyzed. The SMOOTH project will lay the foundations of an innovative macro-financial analytical framework to provide essential insights on the links between financial systems and decarbonization dynamics.

SPARCCLE – Socioeconomic Pathways, Adaptation and Resilience to Changing CLimate in Europe

The SPARCCLE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program, and it is focused on delivering adaptation and mitigation strategies for a just and climate-resilient Europe. The project aims to support policymaking for action on the socioeconomic risks of climate change, establishing new methodological frameworks to link knowledge across disciplines from research communities working on climate impacts and risks in Europe. Bottom-up assessments of multidimensional climate vulnerabilities, risks, damages, and adaptation will be combined with top-down integrated assessment frameworks (IAFs) and leading multi-sectoral macroeconomic models.

UPTAKE – Bridging current knowledge gaps to enable the UPTAKE of carbon dioxide removal methods

UPTAKE aims to facilitate the sustainable upscaling of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods by developing a set of robust strategies through technical, theoretical, and practical analysis accompanied by interactive dialogue within a CDR stakeholder forum. As a result, UPTAKE will develop a harmonised, comprehensive, inclusive, integrated, and transparent CDR knowledge inventory to evaluate a wide range of CDR technologies and methods, quantifying their national, European, and global costs, effectiveness, and removal potential as well as risks, constraints, and side-effects at different scales, and their prospects of technological progress. The UPTAKE approach will allow the assessment of geographical, sectoral, socioeconomic, demographic, and temporal trade-offs, co-benefits, and opportunities emerging from portfolios of different CDR methods. The enhanced socio-technical understanding of CDR methods will feed into an ensemble of state-of-the-art integrated assessment models (IAMs), which will help improve the integration of CDR methods given the EU policy objectives set for 2030, 2050, and beyond climate neutrality. UPTAKE will assess CDR governance and policy frameworks considering social acceptance, accountability, monitoring, and regulations for sustainable CDR rollout at scale. As a result, UPTAKE will generate an open and interactive CDR roadmap explorer to investigate strategies that are resilient to risks of failure and disruption, and minimise adverse impacts on society, economy, and the environment, aiming for a just, inclusive, and sustainable transition.

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