Tuesday, November 15, 2022
After 3.5 very productive and scientifically exciting years, the PARIS REINFORCE research project is coming to an end. To celebrate what we achieved and to effectively disseminate the knowledge co-/produced all these years, the PARIS REINFORCE consortium hosted its final event in Paris, France, on November 15, 2022. The event, "Delivering on the Paris Agreement in a fragmenting world", was held at the breathtaking Salle Louis Liard de la Sorbonne and was co-organised with the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne university and the World Energy Council – France.
The conference agenda included four main sessions, following some welcome notes and opening remarks by all co-hosts.
In the first session, "Quantifying the road to Paris", core PARIS REINFORCE outputs were presented regarding global climate action, e.g. the global results of a multi-model exercise comparing current policy pledges versus what is needed for achieving the net zero target. Results show large gaps in mitigation efforts for most countries along with feasibility concerns. Sustainable transitions in major economies were also highlighted: deep mitigation policies are co-beneficial along various sustainability dimensions — however economic issues exist such as contraction of sectoral production and loss of competitiveness!
In the second session, "Towards Net Zero Emissions in the EU" attempted a deep-dive into European Paris-compliant pathways and respective policy implications that were produced in the project, with a focus on bottlenecks to EU industrial decarbonisation. The possible decarbonization pathways for Europe were analyzed. Power sector is fast decarbonized in an ambitious policy scenario (net zero CO2 between 2035-2045) while other sectors are much slower, especially transportation sector. Green Hydrogen was also discussed as a solution, and possible challenges such as that it can raise German electricity demand by up to 1700TWh in 2040. Stakeholders emphasized the need for financial/policy support and certification schemes for green H2. Sufficiency (i.e. saving unnecessary resources and energy) as a guide for mitigation pathways was also highlighted.
The third session, "Enabling climate policy support", offered a detailed presentation of how the project's flagship exchange platform, I2AM PARIS (https://i2am-paris.eu/), facilitated sense-making of modelling results for climate change mitigation and supported decision-making as well as critical lessons learnt during PARIS REINFORCE. The session also referred to the sustainability of the platform beyond the project, as I2AM PARIS will be further developed by the Horizon2020 and HorizonEU projects ENCLUDE, NDC ASPECTS, IAMCOMPACT and DIAMOND.
HOLISTIC contributed significantly to the development of this open access and transparent data exchange platform, while our company will play a part in its further development in other European projects in which we are also partners.
The final session, "Planning in the light of today’s threats to sustainability", tackled all emerging challenges to EU and international sustainability, including the COVID-19 pandemic (and recovery), today's energy crisis, and the prospect of phasing out Russian fossil-fuel imports. Generally, most participants of the 23 stakeholder workshops of the project emphasized the critical role of demand-side measures for mitigation which are currently limited in most modeling studies.