Events:
Reconciling the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of UNFCCC parties and the quite ambitious global objective of the Paris Agreement is a considerable challenge for the international community, all the more so as climate is only one of the many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) facing the world’s nations.
Beyond eliciting the gap between intentions and objectives, research can contribute to the solutions agenda by exploring three interrelations:
- Between mitigation and other short-term stakes, as overcoming economic crises, containing unemployment, reducing inequalities or cutting down poverty.
- Between the short term and the long term, concerning the dynamics of mitigation policies, as well as their synchronization with policies targeted at other SDGs.
- Between national and global scales, to address feedbacks from international markets, including those for global public goods as climate, and the international mobility of production factors.
This exploration requires tools capable of embracing the various dimensions of energy transitions (economic, technical, social, societal, etc.) into one consistent framework. It also demands focusing not only on the potential winners but also on the potential losers—population subgroups, economic sectors, territories—of such transitions, as well as on those complementary public policies (compensation schemes, career-change programmes, teaching and training courses, etc.) that are consequently called for.
CIRED’s answer to this challenge is the development and animation of an international research network built on a platform of numerical tools specific to each national context, but sharing the same methodological foundations outlined by the IMACLIM Manifesto.
Network extent and coverage
The network extends to research collaboratives at various stages of development, which cover the economies highlighted in the below map.
The focus on South countries echoes CIRED’s historical research agenda on the tension between development and environmental objectives. It also stems from the necessity to explore “blind spots” that are key to a global energy transition in the long term.
The network benefits from its members’ participation to the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) of Stanford University, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) or the IPCC, of which many senior researchers of CIRED and its scientific partners are authors. It also connects to research networks at the science/decision interface, such as the Low-Carbon Society Research Network (LCS-Rnet) established by the G8 in 2009 and the Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project (DDPP) of the French IDDRI.
Ambitions :
- To constitute an international scientific forum and to set up an international training programme dedicated to energy/economy modelling via the approach promoted by the IMACLIM Manifesto.
- To contribute to the design and assessment of climate mitigation strategies in a broad panel of countries, with particular attention to the interrelations with other SDGs as well as between the short term and the long term.
- To analyse the interactions between such national strategies via global public goods markets, international trade and capital and demographic flows.
- To contribute to the public debate on these topics and particularly to the UNFCCC’s Facilitative Dialogue of 2018 and First Global Stocktake of 2023, as well as to the 6th IPCC reports.