Periodic Reporting for period 2 - NAVIGATE (Next generation of AdVanced InteGrated Assessment modelling to support climaTE policy making) Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-02-28 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) play a central role for the assessment of mitigation pathways by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are frequently used to inform international climate policy considerations. They are also used to analyse regional decarbonisation strategies, e.g. in the EU. However, IAMs have to be improved and made more accessible to users in order to provide more targeted advice for the climate policy process in a post-Paris world. This process is characterized by nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and mid-century strategies that aim to collectively reach a global climate goal and at the same time support a sustainable development agenda. To this end, IAMs need to better cover drivers of transformative change and newly emerging mitigation options in order to give a more grounded and detailed picture about pathways to carbon neutrality, including their speed, bottlenecks and flexibilities, as well as their interplay with development processes. IAMs also need to improve 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. Finally, IAMs need to offer greater transparency and accessibility to help build trust and improve the uptake of results by users, not only in the climate policy community, but also by private sector and civil society organisations. Only then can IAMs effectively leverage their integrated systems perspective, cutting across sectors, geographies and time horizons, to support the design of EU climate policies and strategies as well as the EU’s climate diplomacy efforts.NAVIGATE aims to develop the Next generation of AdVanced InteGrated Assessment modelling. In particular, NAVIGATE will:• improve the representation of transformative processes in interlinked social, technological and economic systems by better capturing structural and technological change and by connecting IAMs to socio-technical transitions.• develop capability to understand and represent what drives lifestyle change and how it connects changes in demand for different goods and services. This is needed to adequately capture the transformative role of consumer-driven change for mitigating climate change.• improve the modelling of individual sector transformations in energy, industry, transport, buildings, and agriculture. This will deepen the link between integrated models and more detailed sector models.• develop a new capability to capture spatial and social heterogeneity which is critical for assessing distributional implications of climate change impacts and climate action, and how these relate to human and societal development goals. • deepen the integrated assessment of mitigation pathways in terms of costs, benefits due to avoided impacts, and co-benefits due to interaction with other sustainable development goals. • improve transparency, legitimacy and usability of IAM results for users such as policy makers, businesses, civil society organizations, as well as experts from related disciplines interested in using IAM results for climate policy analysis. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far During the first reporting period of the project, the partners made significant progress towards the objectives by• collecting data and developing relevant domain knowledge for later adoption in integrated assessment modelling approaches;• improving IAM frameworks in key areas incl. structural and technological change;• deepening the understanding of spatial heterogeneity by providing a conceptual framework for increasing IAM spatial resolution and country downscaling, as well as social heterogeneity by integrating inequality and economic, distributional, and physical climate impacts;• taking stock of the state of the art on IAMs, including the publication of 18 peer-reviewed papers for the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC;• enhancing the transparency of IA modelling, including a stakeholder dialogue on model transparency, capacity building via six webinars on recent IAM developments, the update and inclusion of all NAVIGATE model documentations in the IAMC wiki where it is openly available, and the implementation of a NAVIGATE scenario database for visualization and retrieval of scenario data;• analysing impacts of COVID-19.The work during the first phase of the project successfully put in place the basis for the next phase of integrating and comparing new approaches in IA modelling.During the second reporting period of the project, the partners worked on• Completing tasks on connecting relevant domain knowledge to IAMs e.g. the development of structural change scenarios (Work Package 2, abbreviated WP2), a model for analysing lifestyle changes (WP3), data on income inequality and how it is impacted by climate policy (WP4) and projections of selected biophysical climate impacts (WP5);• Completing pilot advancements of IAM frameworks in key areas of WP2 (structural change, industry sector, land use sector), WP3 (transport and buildings sector, international bunkers), WP4 (country downscaling, inequality representation) and WP5 (water-energy-land nexus modelling);• Preparing for model intercomparisons in the final phase of the project, including a stakeholder survey, the development of the study protocol design and the setup of the database and reporting template; • Continued stakeholder dialogue and enhancing the transparency of IA modelling, including a stakeholder dialogue on integrating climate impacts in IAMs (WP1), capacity building via webinars on selected recent IAM developments (WP1), a number of outreach activities communicating research results from across the WPs, the expansion of model documentations (WP6) and the provision of data and modules developed in the project on the NAVIGATOR;The work during the second phase of the project successfully put in place the basis for the final phase of the project. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) NAVIGATE will synthesize its advances towards the next generation of IAMs in two final products. First, a synthesis report for policy makers and other users will collect newly-gained policy insights. Second, the IAM NAVIGATOR will be a toolbox for accessing tools developed, results generated, and capacity building material developed during the course of the project. The objective of the IAM NAVIGATOR is to foster uptake of IAM advances and new policy insights by users, experts in related fields, and the IAM community itself. With these expected outputs, NAVIGATE aims to support EU climate policy, provide input to major scientific assessments such as the IPCC reports, enhance international cooperation, foster innovative policy-making through robust methodologies and tools and reduction of uncertainties and improve the legitimacy of models, methods and tools through greater transparency. With the work performed during the first and second reporting period of the project, the partners already contributed to create these results and impacts. NAVIGAT Logo
