Carbon Intensive Regions in Transition - Unravelling the Challenges of Structural Change

Project Information

CINTRAN

Grant agreement ID: 884539

DOI

10.3030/884539

Project closed

EC signature date 8 April 2020

Start date 1 May 2020

End date 30 April 2024

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 3 072 190,00

EU contribution

€ 2 999 405,00

Coordinated by

WUPPERTAL INSTITUT FUR KLIMA, UMWELT, ENERGIE GGMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CINTRAN (Carbon Intensive Regions in Transition - Unravelling the Challenges of Structural Change)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The European Union has set itself the challenge to become the first climate-neutral continent. This is a tremendous endeavour for regions which are home to large concentrations of carbon-intensive industries. Shutting down significant portions of the regional economy forces those regions to reinvent themselves in economic terms. Moreover, mining and heavy industry have often coined the regions’ identity, they have left their marks on the regional institutional and political structure and have shaped the regions in socio-demographic terms. The CINTRAN project investigated the patterns and dynamics of structural change in those regions in order to help them to adapt. The empirical work focussed on four highly carbon-intensive regions: Ida-Virumaa in Estonia, the Rhenish Mining area in Germany, Western Macedonia in Greece and Silesia in Poland.

CINTRAN provides a scientific evidence base to govern regional decarbonization processes, to design effective policies and coping strategies corresponding to this challenge and to support regional stakeholders in implementing strategies that enable them to engage proactively and constructively with the transformative processes in their respective regions. It did so by creating new innovative knowledge, and by applying and diffusing this knowledge in carbon-intensive regions in the EU. As a result, CINTRAN contributed to a better understanding of the complex issues related to regional structural change and yielded practical recommendations for a just and successful clean-energy transition.

Specifically, CINTRAN has met the following objectives:
- Establish a robust theoretical foundation for integrating diverse disciplinary insights of transformations in carbon-intensive regions and understanding how these transformations are shaped by injustice concerns.
- Develop a generalizable understanding of the dynamics, patterns, costs and impacts of decarbonising carbon-intensive regions.
- Identify successful coping strategies and policy mixes and quantify policy costs for successful and socially-responsible decarbonisation of carbon-intensive regions.
- Provide tools for carbon-intensive regions to self-assess, monitor and compare their transition progress and develop policy recommendations for regional, national and European policy-makers.
- Build a Regions in Transition Academy, Webinar Series and Knowledge base for knowledge exchange in carbon-intensive regions in transition.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The CINTRAN project fully achieved its objectives. Three complementary theoretical frameworks have been developed and introduced to the academic audience including through two published peer-reviewed articles. Empirical work has been successfully implemented the socio-economic, socio-political and socio-demographic analysis of structural change in the four case study regions. As part of the quantitative empirical work a socio-economic risk index has been developed to identify the most at risk coal and carbon-intensive regions in Europe. The assessment of coping strategies in carbon-intensive regions has proved to be particularly insightful with respect to empirical knowledge and several academic journal articles have been published on its basis. The "JT:READY" tool has been developed to enable regional policy-makers to evaluate their region's readiness to achieve a Just Transtion across a broad range of policy areas. Finally, the CINTRAN Transition Academies have brought together many practicioners from coal and carbon-intensive regions across Europe to exchange, learn from each other, and engage with CINTRAN research.

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)

Transition research has so far mostly focussed on successful transitions and the emergence of new, more sustainable technologies and practices. Research on what the transformation of unsustainable socio-technical systems implies for their host regions remains scarce. Regional studies and economic geography have studied spatial implications and the determinants of regional development but have also largely focussed on the bright side, highlighting the foundations of success stories of regional development. Only very limited research exists on why regional development fails. The CINTRAN project has contributed to closing this research gap by systematically studying the patterns and dynamics of decarbonization at the regional level as well as the conditions of a region’s capacity to adapt to the related structural changes. What are enablers, drivers and barriers for transforming carbon-intensive industries? What are the system overlaps between the carbon-intensive industry under transformation and the regional economic and social systems? And what makes a transition and subsequent structural adjustments “successful” from a normative perspective? Which structures condition structural change?

Building on theoretical insights, CINTRAN combined qualitative and quantitative methods to empirically study both structural factors as well as agency, i.e. the ways and means in which regional stakeholders and policy makers can manage the structural adjustments.
Quantitative methods were applied to identify key socio-economic implications of decarbonization for the most vulnerable regions in Europe. CINTRAN research has broken down the energy system implications of national climate and energy plans at the regional level and quantified their socio-economic impacts on regional value creation and employment. On that basis we were also able to provide a quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of the Just Transition Mechanism to alleviate some of those impacts.
A combination of qualitative methods have been applied to study in depth four regional case studies through three complementary analytical lenses:
First, we will studied the regions’ economic dependence from the carbon-intensive industry, also taking into account other mega-trends such as globalization, automation and digitalization. Second, we studied the institutional set-up and politics of decarbonization in the four regions, including with respect to the role of populism and anti-democratic attitudes. And third, we studied aspects such as migration, gender and various dimensions of inequality that may impinge on a region’s capacity to manage the transition in a just and equitable way.

CINTRAN will also investigated ways in which regional stakeholders and policy makers respond to the transformative changes at the political, economic, social or cultural level. We assessed and categorized coping strategies, practices that successfully restore or create agency and help regional stakeholders to adapt to changes. To support agency on the part of regional policy makers, CINTRAN developed a tool to help them to self-assess and monitor the progress of transformation and evaluate the policy mix in place to facilitate a just transition. Finally, CINTRAN made the knowledge created available to practitioners and academics by sustaining the coaltransitions.org knowledge hub, through a series of thematic webinars and the CINTRAN Transition Academies.

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