In the research and Innovation section of the January issue of ERCIM News, the LOCALISED project is spotlighted for Tailoring Decarbonisation and Resilience Strategies to Drive Regional and Local Action. 

As highlighted in ERCIM News 136, existing European information platforms supporting a shift to a net-zero energy system have so far been limited in providing information for promoting this transition only targeting the national level. Therefore, LOCALISED is designed to close the information gap between national-level decarbonisation plans and local needs for planning and implementing an energy transition towards net-zero while accounting for remaining adaptation.

A commonly held perspective, endorsed by scientists, policymakers, and the public at large, asserts that tackling the climate crisis and promoting sustainable development must be interconnected. To facilitate a shift toward a green global economy while still enabling ongoing economic growth, substantial changes in the structure of global production and consumption are necessary. Nevertheless, the specifics of resource reallocation—how and where it should occur—remain contingent upon the assumptions made regarding the pace of the green transition.

A recent paper—by our LOCALISED partner CMCC—explores three transition scenarios, each characterised by the pace of the shift from a fossil-fuel-based economy (brown) to a renewable energy-dominated one (green). These scenarios include a constant (linear) transition, a rapid transition, and a delayed transition. The paper analyses the demands of each pathway in terms of reallocating capital and labour, as well as investing in capital stocks and research and development (R&D). Through this analysis, one can identify key factors influencing various transition paths and inform overall policy priorities.

This paper builds on a widely used integrated assessment model of climate change and economy and introduces several important changes and additions that enable the representation of the green transition in a simplified but relevant manner. Specifically, our model, shown in the figure above, has two productive sectors, one “green” and one “brown”. Capital and labour can be moved between these two sectors at a certain cost. Moreover, long-term productivity growth depends on R&D investments which must be allocated between the two sectors.

Comparing different transition pathways, the first implication of the speed of the transition is for the trajectory of CO2 emissions where fast transition entails deeper and earlier reduction of the emissions while the other pathways reduce emissions more gradually. Across scenarios, transitions are achieved through different combinations of factor transfers from the “brown” to the “green” sector and investments in green capital stocks and R&D. In particular, the fast transition pathway relies very heavily on transfers of capital from the “brown” to the “green” sector with labour reallocation being comparatively more limited and homogeneous across scenarios. The fast pathway also requires substantial emission abatement efforts in the “brown” sector, which results in a sharp decline in emissions. The slower pathways, meanwhile, feature a larger amount of investment and capital accumulation generated within the “green” sector itself, hence avoiding a part of the cost associated with reallocating capital across sectors.

To accelerate local decarbonization efforts and foster informed decision-making on climate action, the LOCALISED project became part of the MAIA community, which collects networks platforms, expertise and research on climate change, with the overall aim of increasing project visibility and engagement.

The MAIA Multiply program serves as a platform to bring together initiatives committed to tackling the challenges of climate change. Indeed, it aims to amplify the impact of projects like LOCALISED by fostering connections and facilitating knowledge exchange. 

Currently, we have taken the opportunity offered by MAIA to highlight our project through a featured News. This article allows us to introduce LOCALISED by promoting the engagement of urban decarbonisation practitioners, regional authorities and governance experts, and all key actors in shaping a sustainable, climate-resilient future.

In the implementation of the project’s communication, dissemination and exploitation strategy, it is crucial to leverage resources and create synergies in order to extend the transfer of results for uptake by other stakeholders and to build a community that enables the exploration of different outreach-related activities. By joining the MAIA Multiply programme, LOCALISED is entering a new opportunity to generate collective impact.

In today’s research landscape, Gender and Diversity are increasingly recognized as vital elements of working culture and integral components of multidisciplinary research teams. However, while many projects acknowledge their importance, gender and diversity monitoring is often less prominent. 

In LOCALISED, we have incorporated gender and diversity as fundamental aspects of our project management approach, with regular monitoring by all project partners. Indeed, we have developed a methodology, outlined in our official report (LOCALISED Deliverable 1.5), to guide our own project, but also to serve as a prototype for promoting gender mainstreaming, inclusivity and diversity in all Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe research projects.

In order to provide insights on how to translate our commitment to gender and diversity into tangible actions and outcomes within multidisciplinary research projects, we have created an easy-to-use and engaging factsheet which provides essential information in a concise form. The “Gender and Diversity monitoring in multidisciplinary research projects” factsheet outlines the main strategies employed within the LOCALISED project to ensure gender equality and diversity at four levels (institutional, structural, communicational, and research). Special attention is given to the professional and personal links and understanding between team members in project activities.

Climate justice demonstration. CC: BlueLENS (www.blue.lens)

The University of Twente – LOCALISED partner – has recently strengthened its professional, research and practice expertise in the domain of climate change. Along with the Green Hub Twente, the platform for sustainability transformation at the UT, and the UT Climate Centre, the recent appointment of Debra Roberts as a part-time Professor at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente clearly bolsters UT’s commitment to build capacity to and conduct research on one of the most pressing challenges of this century.

The week of the 6th of November, prof. Roberts visited her new part-time Faculty and shared her extensive knowledge and expertise with its members. She left significant statements while holding several meetings with staff members and research groups, presenting colloquiums, and responding to interviews. Prof. Roberts is an energetic supporter of equity and justice aspects. One of her remarkable quotes were “[…] You are not going to get the ambitious climate action you want or the ambitious change of in the current city circumstances without an improvement on equity and justice […]”.

Indeed, ensuring a just transition and just adaptation not only ensures protecting everyone from climate change impacts but also makes implementing our climate actions more feasible. Justice has been increasingly discussed in the realm of climate action in recent years. Several authors detected a risk of increasing existing vulnerabilities or introducing new vulnerabilities while implementing mitigation or adaptation actions[1,2]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other well-recognised authors have identified these facts as malmitigation or maladaptation. While at the beginning of the uptake of climate actions, their outcomes were still unknown, now, decades of experience in implementing climate actions have taught us what, in theory, logical actions such as increasing taxes on local fuel could do to economically vulnerable citizens[3–7]. Obviously, communities suffering from these unintended negative effects of climate actions are not happy about this[8]. Thus, in many countries around the globe, the critique of low-carbon transitions by social groups is rising[8].

Usually, critique is grounded in the final distribution of benefits or burdens, i.e., distributional injustice, or related to attempts that harm their local identity without any previous consultation, i.e. procedural injustice[2,8–10]. Planning climate actions with social groups being part of the process – increasing procedural and recognitional justice – also increases the potential for distributional justice—hence, equitable and just climate action. While doing so, the acceptability of climate actions is likely to increase[3,11]. Moreover, the involvement of stakeholders might also increase the technical and/or economic capacity of social groups, making climate action more likely to succeed overall [12,13].

We shall be aware that justice and equity are not merely random factors we must include in our climate agenda but that they help achieve climate goals—we should make them paradigms of climate action, as Prof. Roberts remarks.

REFERENCES

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[2] S. Hughes, M. Hoffmann, Just urban transitions: Toward a research agenda, Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Chang. 11 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.640.

[3] P. Kashwan, Climate justice in the global North: An introduction, Case Stud. Environ. 5 (2021) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2021.1125003.

[4] K. Mintz-Woo, Carbon tax ethics, Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Chang. (2023) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.858.

[5] B.K. Sovacool, Who are the victims of low-carbon transitions? Towards a political ecology of climate change mitigation, Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 73 (2021) 101916. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.101916.

[6] B.K. Sovacool, P. Newell, S. Carley, J. Fanzo, Equity, technological innovation and sustainable behaviour in a low-carbon future, Nat. Hum. Behav. 6 (2022) 326–337. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01257-8.

[7] B.K. Sovacool, B. Linnér, M.E. Goodsite, The political economy of climate adaptation, Nat. Publ. Gr. 5 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2665.

[8] R.E. Shelton, H. Eakin, Who’s fighting for justice?: Advocacy in energy justice and just transition scholarship, Environ. Res. Lett. 17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7341.

[9] P. Tschakert, M. Parsons, E. Atkins, A. Garcia, N. Godden, N. Gonda, K.P. Henrique, S. Sallu, K. Steen, G. Ziervogel, Methodological lessons for negotiating power, political capabilities, and resilience in research on climate change responses, World Dev. 167 (2023) 106247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106247.

[10] C. Godinho, What do we know about the employment impacts of climate policies? A review of the ex post literature, WIREs Clim. Chang. 13 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.794.

[11] K. Swanson, Equity in Urban Climate Change Adaptation Planning: A Review of Research, Urban Plan. 6 (2021) 287–297. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i4.4399.

[12] K. Swanson, Centering Equity and Justice in Participatory Climate Action Planning: Guidance for Urban Governance Actors, Plan. Theory Pract. 24 (2023) 207–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2023.2189288.

[13] A. Garvey, J.B. Norman, M. Büchs, J. Barrett, A “spatially just” transition? A critical review of regional equity in decarbonisation pathways, Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 88 (2022) 102630. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102630.