PARIS REINFORCE - Delivering on the Paris Agreement: A demand-driven, integrated assessment modelling approach

Part of EU Open Research Repository
Published June 21, 2021 | Version 1.0
Journal article Open

Where is the EU headed given its current climate policy? A stakeholder-driven model inter-comparison

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Energy Policy Unit, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
  • 2. E4SMA S.r.l., Turin, Italy
  • 3. SEURECO, Paris, France
  • 4. Climate Change Policy Group, CAS, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  • 5. Cambridge Econometrics, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  • 6. RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), Venice, Italy & Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy & Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Venice, Italy
  • 7. Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
  • 8. Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
  • 9. Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 10. Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
  • 11. Bruegel, Brussels, Belgium
  • 12. Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Leioa, Spain
  • 13. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 14. CICERO Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, Norway
  • 15. Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom & International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria
  • 16. SEURECO, Paris, France & Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

Description

Recent calls to do climate policy research with, rather than for, stakeholders have been answered in non-modelling science. Notwithstanding progress in modelling literature, however, very little of the scenario space traces back to what stakeholders are ultimately concerned about. With a suite of eleven integrated assessment, energy system and sectoral models, we carry out a model inter-comparison for the EU, the scenario logic and research questions of which have been formulated based on stakeholders' concerns. The output of this process is a scenario framework exploring where the region is headed rather than how to achieve its goals, extrapolating its current policy efforts into the future. We find that Europe is currently on track to overperforming its pre-2020 40% target yet far from its newest ambition of 55% emissions cuts by 2030, as well as looking at a 1.0–2.35 GtCO2 emissions range in 2050. Aside from the importance of transport electrification, deployment levels of carbon capture and storage are found intertwined with deeper emissions cuts and with hydrogen diffusion, with most hydrogen produced post-2040 being blue. Finally, the multi-model exercise has highlighted benefits from deeper decarbonisation in terms of energy security and jobs, and moderate to high renewables-dominated investment needs.

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Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.5619308 (DOI)

Funding

European Commission
PARIS REINFORCE - Delivering on the Paris Agreement: A demand-driven, integrated assessment modelling approach 820846