There is an urgent need to strengthen collective action to limit global warming to levels consistent with the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement. The NEWPATHWAYS project aims to inform solutions to strengthen action by developing and analysing next-generation Paris-aligned global and national low-emission transformation pathways for the next global stocktake in 2028. The project objectives are to promote enhanced transparency, consistency, and clarity of GHG emission reduction commitments, identify opportunities to leverage equity and finance to strengthen collective climate action, and establish new national and global transformation pathways that limit temporary overshoot, rely on deep sectoral transformations, combine climate and nature protection, and are aligned with sustainable development and just transition objectives. The project will rely on a multi-level stakeholder dialogue to co-create knowledge and build user capacity to maximize relevance and uptake of its results. The NEWPATHWAYS consortium combines strong global and national pathway modelling capacity with expertise from the social sciences, economics and policy analysis. National modelling teams come from a diverse set of countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe covering two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. The robust global and diverse national modelling capabilities with simultaneous access to global and national policy debates will prove effective in providing critical information to global and national policymakers and stakeholders for strengthening climate action towards achieving the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement.

The NDC ASPECTS project will provide inputs to the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement (PA) and support the potential revision of existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the PA’s parties, as well as development of new NDCs for the post 2030 period. The project will particularly focus on four sectoral systems that are highly relevant in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions they produce yet have thus far made only limited progress in decarbonization. To advance these transformations will require to understand and leverage the Eigenlogic of those systems and take into account specific transformation challenges. These sectors are transport & mobility (land-based transport and international aviation & shipping), emission intensive industries, buildings, and agriculture, forestry & land-use, including their supply by and interaction with the energy conversion sector. For each of those sectors we will undertake „Sectoral Conversation“ to co-create evidence-based narratives with sectoral experts and stakeholders drawing on the consortium’s extensive networks. These narratives can then be translated into global pathways informing the Global Stocktake as well as national pathways for strategically selected countries for each of the four sectors. As an input to the Sectoral Conversations we will systematically assess transformation challenges and opportunities (economic, technological, political/institutional, capacity and awareness), including taking into account experiences with the implementation of the first round of NDCs as well as model-based quantitative analyses. Additionally, we will identify ways and means to improve international governance to enable and facilitate sectoral transformations.

An important question for policy makers, in the G20 and beyond, is how to bring climate action into the broader sustainable development agenda. Objectives like energy poverty eradication, increased well-being and welfare, air quality improvement, energy security enhancement, and food and water availability will continue to remain important over the next several decades. There have been relatively few scientific analyses, however, that have explored the complex interplay between climate action and development while simultaneously taking both global and national perspectives. The CD-LINKS project will change this, filling this critical knowledge gap and providing much-needed information for designing complementary climate-development policies. CD-LINKS has four overarching goals: (i) to gain an improved understanding of the linkages between climate change policies (mitigation/adaptation) and multiple sustainable development objectives, (ii) to broaden the evidence base in the area of policy effectiveness by exploring past and current policy experiences, (iii) to develop the next generation of globally consistent, national low-carbon development pathways, and (iv) to establish a research network and capacity building platform in order to leverage knowledge-exchange among institutions from Europe and other key players within the G20. Through six highly integrated work packages – from empirical research to model and scenario development – CD-LINKS will advance the state-of-the-art of climate-development policy analysis and modelling in a number of areas. The project aims to have a pronounced impact on the policy dialogue, both nationally and internationally: an important outcome of the project will be a list of country-specific policy recommendations for effectively managing the long-term transformation process. These recommendations will point out opportunities for policy synergies and at the same time respect political and institutional barriers to implementation.