The EUCalc project has delivered an urgently needed comprehensive framework for research, business, and public sector decision makers which identifies and enables an appraisal of synergies and trade-offs of feasible European decarbonisation pathways. EUCalc explores the impact of the choices that can be made in a broad variety of sectors, including power and heat generation, transport, industry, buildings, agriculture, and food and of the underlying lifestyle choices of Europe’s citizens in terms of the climatological, societal, and economic consequences. For politicians and policy makers at the European and member state levels, stakeholders and innovators, EUCalc provided a Transitions Pathways Explorer (TPE), which can be used as a concrete planning tool for reconciling the urgent need for technological and societal change, against the associated inertia and lock-in effects. The modeling approach and the associated Transition Pathways Explorer are trans-disciplinarily designed for accuracy, transparency, speed and accessibility. Since the time dynamics for sectoral approaches are represented as stylized future scenarios in the model, users can immediately grasp the consequences of their changes made in policy ambitions and which they may have in terms of GHG emissions, climate impacts, employment, or resource use. This approach uncloses the full option space of viable decarbonisation pathways instead of only showing the futures that are imaginable within the present economic realities. It may, thus, help to re-establish the supremacy of politics over economic constraints. Despite the inherent challenges of developing a new model that is, at the same time, scientifically sound and easy to use by non-experts, the completed project work to date has contributed to fulfill the project objectives, namely:
Fix new conceptual challenges like coupling a formal economic model featuring inter-sectoral input-output and international trade linkages with sectoral-level modules covering individual EU member states + Switzerland.
Incorporate a mechanism via the climate module to account for the fact that climate impacts in Europe depend also on decisions taken elsewhere in the Rest of the World.
Provide a much richer spatial detail of inputs in which all of the 28 member states + Switzerland are individually accounted.
Develop a highly granular agricultural/land module in order to not disregard the many interactions land has with sectors like lifestyles, energy, water and biodiversity.
