ELEVATE – Enabling and Leveraging Climate Action Towards Netzero Emissions

ELEVATE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and the consortium consists of 20 partners and brings together leading research groups to support climate policymaking within and outside the EU. These research groups are involved in modelling international climate policy, national policies, social science, policy analysis, environmental assessment, and stakeholder engagement.

World-leading institutions in globally integrated assessment modelling are a central part of the ELEVATE consortium (IIASA, PBL, PIK, CMCC, E3M, NIES, KU, UFRJ/COPPETEC, and UMD). This means that the consortium involves all teams that have played a leading role in the coordination and development of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which serve to integrate the assessment of mitigation, adaptation and impacts research across the climate change science community.

ELEVATE’s main aim is to develop transformative new scientific insights to support the preparations of NDCs and national climate policies focused on achieving net-zero emissions mid-century in line with the Paris Agreement. This is done by a transdisciplinary consortium of national and international climate research teams. ELEVATE will feature novel state-of-the-art contributions:

1. support the formulation of new climate policies and NDCs by establishing and facilitating a strong interaction between researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders involved in national and international climate policy for the co-production of knowledge and mutual learning (WP1);
2. identify transformational policies to accelerate climate action beyond NDCs and towards net-zero by conducting a systematic assessment of the impact of current policies (including the ambitions formulated in NDCs and mid-century strategies) for a large range of countries (WP2);
3. enhance the scientific understanding of the technological and behavioural options in different sectors (including energy, transport, industry and land-use), potential political barriers to their implementation and means to overcome them, and the associated transformation pathways to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in light of the net-zero emission target (WP3);
4. identify options to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of international climate governance and policy, including the carbon-border adjustment mechanism (WP4);
5. represent justice and sustainability in climate mitigation pathways by fully integrating insights from social sciences (WP5);
6. develop a new generation of national and global mitigation scenarios in the context of the Paris goals, exploring the ambition of achieving net-zero emission targets, and based on the representation of enabling factors evaluated in WP2-W5 (WP6) fully considering COVID-19 impacts and recovery plans;
7. develop consistent definitions of net-zero emission goals and identify milestones, drivers and barriers towards achieving these in an economically and environmentally responsible and socially inclusive way (WP6);
8. increase worldwide capacity for scientific support of climate policy and share best practices to support the production of scenarios at the national level and inform domestic stakeholders and policymakers (WP7)

Expected results
ELEVATE will allow a new generation of global and national mitigation scenarios, exploring the possibility of strengthening climate policies in countries worldwide and support net-zero goals. It will assess the impact of different ways to formulate net-zero goals and the impact of climate uncertainty. Outcomes will include detailed pathways and milestones on how policies can be strengthened to achieving net-zero goals. ELEVATE will go significantly beyond the state-of-the-art by 1) the inclusion of social sciences in all aspects of the analysis providing significantly improved insights into issues related to implementation and feasibility, 2) the detailed focus on sectoral action, 3) the stakeholder interaction and 4) the direct collaboration between the global and national teams on net-zero emission scenarios.