Exploring National and Global Actions to reduce Greenhouse gas Emissions

Project Information

ENGAGE

Grant agreement ID: 821471

DOI

10.3030/821471

Project closed

EC signature date 3 May 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials

Total cost

€ 7 089 831,11

EU contribution

€ 7 089 831,11

Coordinated by

INTERNATIONALES INSTITUT FUER ANGEWANDTE SYSTEMANALYSE
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ENGAGE (Exploring National and Global Actions to reduce Greenhouse gas Emissions)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

As the world faces risks of dangerous climate change, policy-makers, industry and civil society leaders are counting on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform and guide strategies to deliver on the objectives of the Paris Agreement (PA). ENGAGE rose to this challenge by engaging these stakeholders in co-producing a new generation of global and national decarbonisation pathways. These new pathways supplement natural science, engineering and economics with cutting-edge insights from social science in order to reflect multidimensional feasibility of decarbonisation and identify opportunities to strengthen climate policies. In addition, they link national mitigation strategies of major emitters with the PA’s objectives, integrate potential game-changing innovations, and advance conceptually novel approaches to architectures of international climate agreements. The new pathways have been developed in an iterative global and national stakeholder process with an international consortium of leading global and national IAMs and social scientists. This co-production process ensured that the pathways are credible, legitimate, and rooted in concrete policy and industry experience, making them relevant to the 2023 global stocktake and able to feed into the mid-century strategies of major emitters. ENGAGE also quantified avoided impacts of climate change, co-benefits and trade-offs of climate policy, and identified the biggest sectoral opportunities for climate change mitigation. The ENGAGE project set new standards of transparency for global and national IAMs.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

i. To build a legitimate, transparent, and iterative knowledge co-production process including different stakeholder groups
ENGAGE has used innovative approaches to organise online dialogues between stakeholders and researchers, making the scientific research more accessible to the stakeholders and more focused and relevant to their needs. Using an iterative stakeholder process consisting of consultations and a series of meetings, stakeholders have provided feedback on the design of tools to collect information on multi-dimensional feasibility, national and regional decarbonisation pathways, effort sharing principles, and research ideas for designing the new generation of decarbonisation pathways. This work has been documented and disseminated in a Policy Brief and Peer Reviewed Article

ii. To conceptualise and operationalise multidimensional feasibility of decarbonisation policies and pathways
Two frameworks conceptualising feasibility have been developed and applied to national and global scenarios: one which focuses on identifying trade-offs between multiple feasibility dimensions and a second framework which focuses on evaluating the feasibility of specific climate actions based on historical experience. This framework has been applied to scenarios in the IAMC 1.5°C Scenario Explorer supporting the IPCC SR1.5 assessment and has subsequently been applied in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report as framework for evaluating transformation pathways from IAMs. The second feasibility framework focuses on feasibility space approach for individual mitigation options and has been applied to national models. The work on multidimensional feasibility has been published in a Policy Brief, numerous peer reviewer articles, used in the IPCC Assessments and been discussed with UNFCCC policy makers.


iii. Quantify national avoided impacts of climate change and identify climate policy portfolios that maximize co-benefits and minimize trade-offs with other sustainability objectives
ENGAGE teams quantified the benefits or trade-offs of climate policies on biodiversity, food, poverty, water, air quality, health, and employment, particularly for vulnerable populations. The information on these topics is brought together on the ENGAGE Climate Solutions Explorer: https://www.climate-solutions-explorer.eu/. This website has been presented to policy makers and scientists at country level, EU and in the UNFCCC process.

iv. Develop a new generation of decarbonization pathways which represent multidimensional feasibility and reflect all characteristics of the PA to inform the 2023 stocktake and national mid-term strategies
The first generation of global pathways has been developed and published in five papers which were heavily cited in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report. Continuously updated sets of national and global scenarios to evaluate the effects of current policies and NDCs and explore the possibilities for more ambitious emission reduction targets were submitted throughout the project and in to the UNFCCC Stock Take process. This work has been published in a number of Policy Briefs, peer reviewed papers, and presented at events at UNFCCC COP26, COP27, and at COP28.

v. Inform and contribute to the IPCC AR6
ENGAGE national and sectoral model scenarios (on buildings, energy, land, and transport) were provided to the IPCC AR6, engaging with the climate research community. The ENGAGE scenarios’ data are featured in almost half of the AR6 WG III chapters and various figures and tables in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) and Technical Summary, providing information on global emissions reductions, net-zero targets, and temperature outcomes. The systematic assessment of emission budgets and overshoot scenarios in Task 3.1 led to a large representation of ENGAGE in the report. For example, out of 1,202 long-term emissions scenarios assessed in Chapter 3, more than 500 were ENGAGE scenarios, and of the 9 Illustrative Pathways featured in the report, 3 are ENGAGE pathways. Scenarios from the national modelling teams participating in ENGAGE were also used in Chapter 4 to inform the assessment of current policies scenarios, NDCs and emissions gaps.

The outcomes of the ENGAGE project are documented in a Summary for Policy Makers (https://engage-climate.org/resources-for-policymakers/) ENGAGE papers have been viewed and downloaded more than 850.000 times, the workshops and dissemination activities reached more than 6500 people worldwide, and generated more than 600 media pieces.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The multidimensional feasibility assessment framework has been applied to the first generation of global scenario pathways and has been used to develop a modelling protocol for scenarios that take feasibility considerations into account. These novel scenarios show how to strengthen climate action in line with the Paris Agreement's long-term goals while also accounting for feasibility constraints and enablers.

ENGAGE also explored the consistency of mid-century strategies and policies with the overall objectives of the Paris Agreement. The methodological approach integrates national and global pathways into a coherent set of low-carbon pathways, assessing national mid-century strategies and their consistency with global emission pathways to 2°C and 1.5°C warming levels to identify the most effective policies in different countries and sectors.

The outcomes of the ENGAGE project have informed global climate negotiations through submissions into UNFCCC processes and presentations at COPs, through its major contributions to the IPCC 6th Assessment Report and through direct stakeholder and dissemination events with national, EU, and global climate policy makers.