Next generation of advanced integrated assessment modelling to support climate policy making

Delivering on the Paris Agreement to hold global warming well below 2°C and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C requires rapid decarbonisation of societies around the world. To be successful, such rapid decarbonisation should be embedded in a broader agenda of sustainable development as defined by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 agenda. The successful implementation of the Paris Agreement hence requires insight into how countries and sectors can work in concert to build a low-carbon, climate resilient, and sustainable future.

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) provide a perspective in terms of regionally and sectorally differentiated climate change mitigation pathways towards the Paris climate goals. IAMs are frequently used to inform international climate policy considerations and are used to analyse regional decarbonisation strategies. These models have to be considerably improved and made more accessible to users in order to provide more targeted advice for climate policy processes in a post-Paris world.

IAMs need to better cover drivers of transformative change and newly emerging mitigation options to give a more grounded and detailed picture about pathways to carbon neutrality. They also need to improve in terms of how they capture distributional impacts of climate policies and climate change impacts in order to articulate more clearly the benefit of climate action and its role for sustainable development. IAMs also need to offer greater transparency and accessibility to help build trust and improve the uptake of results by users.

The NAVIGATE project therefore aims to
1. Substantially improve the representation of transformative processes in interlinked social, technological and economic systems
2. Develop a new capability to represent transformative changes in consumer goods and services
3. Substantially improve the modelling of individual sector transformations
4. Develop a new capability to capture spatial and social heterogeneity
5. Deepen the integrated assessment of mitigation pathways in terms of a multi-dimensional assessment
6. Improve transparency legitimacy and usability of IAMs

Climate Analytics will support the stakeholder dialogue by creating and sustaining a continuous exchange between the project and the key groups of stakeholders. There will be a total of three stakeholder dialogues with actors from policy, businesses, civil society organisations and topical experts. Climate Analytics will also be involved in the spatial downscaling of IAMs and an improved regional resolution of the models. Finally, Climate Analytics will be involved in a work package on climate impacts, co-benefits and links with other SDGs. Under this work package, Climate Analytics will lead the task of including biophysical climate change impacts as a function of mitigation and adaptation in IAMs. The focus will be on establishing scenarios of sectoral adaptive capacity for the agriculture, water and energy sectors. Synergies and trade-offs between climate action and the human development goals will aim to capture distributional impacts and inequality, allowing for identification of potential tensions between climate policies, the SDGs and climate change impacts.