Insights from Modelling and Analysis for Global Interactions and National Engagement

Context

Under the Paris agreement, the vast majority of the world’s countries have committed to attaining net-zero emissions in the second half of this century, and to submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC’s) in five-year cycles outlining planned emission reductions, and the policy measures that will generate these reductions. In order to assess progress toward its net-neutrality goal, the Paris Agreement sets out a process for a Global Stocktake (GS) that will take place halfway through each NDC-cycle. The first one is set to take place in 2023.

Current pledges and actions taken by individual countries and the global community are widely acknowledged as insufficient to achieve the Paris agreement’s collective mitigation goal, and it is therefore necessary to support increased collective ambition, including by key emerging economies in their efforts towards the goals set out in the Paris agreement. The challenges are at once scientific and political: 1) a first challenge regards the lack of tools to define national transformational long-term strategies in many countries, and the difficulty of connecting national transformative pathways to global ones; and 2) a second challenge relates to linking and supporting the domestic process of policy development in key sectors, and to ensure that it is consistent with the long-term transformation required by these sectors to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

Presentation

The objective of the IMAGINE project is to contribute to the 2023 GS by synthesising available knowledge and producing new assessments that help to identify opportunities to accelerate national and global climate action in a manner that can both inform the GS process and build upon its outputs and outcomes to support the increase of collective ambition. The project will do so in three main ways:

• The development and improvement of domestic modelling capacity in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa
• The development of transformational national scenarios in the aforementioned countries
• Engaging with policymakers and other stakeholders in order to reflect insights rendered through the definition of the scenarios in domestic and international policy.

To perform these tasks, the project connects 14 different institutions, including in-country modelling teams in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa; experts of global modelling; institutions with experience in organising collaborative international work in the global modelling arena; and institutions with experience of domestic and international policy discussions on climate issues.

The in-country modelling teams include the following institutions: Fundacíon Bariloche (Argentina); CentroClima/COPPETEC (Brazil); Tsinghua University (China), Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (India), Center for Research on Energy Policy of The Institut Teknologi Bandung & the Bogor Agricultural University (Indonesia), Tempus Analítica (Mexico) and the Energy Systems Research Group at University of Cape Town (South Africa). The project is led by IDDRI, and the institutions participating in the other above-mentionned capacities include Climate Analytics, CIRED, GAEL, BC3 and SDSN. The project is funded by the European Commission.

Events

• Launch event (closed event): with Europe Aid, on March, 26, 29 and 30 2021 (3 days)
• Second workshop (closed event): project meeting on October, 5 & 6 2021 (2 days)