Assessing uncertainties to address climate change

ERC Grant to Massimo Tavoni: funding for cutting-edge research and recognition of international excellence

Translating complex and deep uncertainties into robust policy recommendations: Italian CMCC scientist Massimo Tavoni, Director of RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and full professor at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for his project focused on debiasing the uncertainties of climate stabilization pathways.

Massimo Tavoni, Director of RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and full professor at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, is one of the winners of the latest round of Consolidator Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), the first pan-European funding organisation for frontier research.

In this call, Prof. Tavoni’s research has been selected among over 2,000 applicants who submitted proposals. The ERC, aiming to stimulate scientific excellence by encouraging competition for funding between the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, has awarded the research proposal EUNICE (Euníkē: “eu”, good, and “níkē”, victory) as a project that is worthy of being included among the proposals that allow researchers to conduct pioneering research on topics and with methods of their choosing.

More in detail, EUNICE aims to correct misspecification and biases of ensembles of climate-energy-economy models studying climate stabilization and develop ways to validate scenarios’ insights.

EUNICE’s primary outcome is to develop a methodologically innovative and comprehensive approach to quantifying, translating, and communicating relevant uncertainties associated with low carbon pathways and exploring distant futures, transforming the methodological and experimental foundations of model-based climate assessments. Three main objectives resulting in three major research pillars: to expand scenarios into the deep future and quantify their uncertainties; to eliminate scenarios’ biases and allow them to track tracking near-term disruptions (such as extreme and unexpected events); to convert model-generated maps of the future into resilient, robust and reliable recommendations, and experimentally test how to communicate them effectively.

The approach and insights of EUNICE can be applied to other high-stakes environmental, social and technological evaluations. EUNICE’s unique combination of computational science with human behaviour and citizens’ participation will broker debates on high-stake societal decisions and increase faith and recognition of scientific methods.

EUNICE adds to the list of ERC Grants obtained by CMCC researchers: CMCC Foundation, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and CMCC@Ca’Foscari, the strategic partnership between the CMCC Foundation and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, have been awarded by ERC for the excellence of their cutting-edge research with seven projects, such as – besides EUNICE – 2D4D, SMOOTH, ENERGY-A, COBHAM, ICARUS, RISICO.

ERC Consolidator Grant 2021 – Indicative statistics 

List of all selected researchers (alphabetical order). 

More information about the ERC grants at the official ERC Press Release