The RECIPE project highlights crucial strategic options for Europe’s climate and energy policy at two different scales. Firstly, it informs the relevant stakeholders about the most important barriers to implementation in the European power and heat, industry, transport and agriculture sectors. Secondly, it highlights Europe’s main strategic options in the international arena.
18 months from 01/04/2008 to 01/09/2009
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/recipe
General aims
The RECIPE project highlights crucial strategic options for Europe’s climate and energy policy at two different scales.
- Firstly, it informs the relevant stakeholders about the most important barriers to implementation in the European power and heat, industry, transport and agriculture sectors.
- Secondly, it highlights Europe’s main strategic options in the international arena.
The involved research teams are convinced that both questions are highly interlinked. Europe could lose its leading role in the international climate arena if its domestic energy policy fails. However, a successful European domestic energy policy will be much more likely if a credible international climate regime emerges within the next decade. Addressing these highly relevant questions requires a careful synthesis of quantitative modelling results and qualitative information derived from case studies.
The project assembles the latest methodological knowledge from four experienced and renowned project partners: CIRED, Climate Strategies, CMCC, and PIK. RECIPE makes use of the most up-to-date regionalised climate-economy models to deliver a detailed and comprehensive overview of GHG mitigation potentials and respective abatement costs for the European Union under different scenarios. The results allows drawing conclusions concerning the economic impacts of feasible mitigation policies on the macroeconomic as well as the sectoral level and provide guidelines for the formulation of environmental policy.
The project aims at filling the research gaps on abatement costs and mitigation options in the European context by:
- Calculating the mitigation costs and strategies for Europe dependent on scenarios about the future of an emerging post-2012 climate regime
- Identifying the barriers to implementation within key sectors (e.g. the power and transport sectors)
- Analysing appropriate policy instruments and the potential scope of their application
- Exploring the role of financial markets as well as risks and opportunities of carbon abatement for stakeholders in the financial industry
CMCC Role
The CMCC research team provided one of the three models WITCH developed by FEEM) used to investigate the economic adjustment effects of long-term climate policy aiming at stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm. WITCH is a regional model in which the non-cooperative nature of international relationships is explicitly accounted for. The regional and intertemporal dimensions of the model make it possible to differentiate climate policies across regions and over time. In this way, several policy scenarios can be considered.
Expected results
The final results of the project are available in the form of several working papers and a Policy Brief named “RECIPE: The Economics of Decarbonization” published in November 2009. All documents can be dowloaded from the project website.
Activity
The CMCC harmonized the WITCH model to the other two to represent very similar assumption with regards to socio-economic developments, thus analyzing the energy system transformation, the macro-economic effects of climate policy, and the sectoral behavior of energy consumption under different scenarios.
Partners
- PIK - Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung
- CIRED - Centre International pour l'Environnement et le Développement
- Climate Strategies
- CMCC - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change