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 global 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.

The call for applications for the ELEVATE Research Exchange Programme is open. Further information can be found here.

General Objectives

To implement the Paris Agreement's goals, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced to net-zero around 2050. However, current policies are still insufficient to reach this target and net-zero promises by countries are generally lacking concrete roadmaps how to reach them. ELEVATE aims to create a robust scientific understanding required to strengthen NDCs and current climate policies towards reaching net-zero emissions. For this, ELEVATE brings together a unique multidisciplinary consortium of leading international and national modelling teams, climate policy experts and social scientists. The consortium aims to interact directly with policymakers to define information gaps and attractive policies, thus enhancing usability of the knowledge base and stimulating mutual learning. Based on this, the consortium will systematically assess NDCs and policies at the global and national levels to identify current progress and good practice policies. Subsequently, ELEVATE will look into a range of critical enabling factors related to sectoral action, international climate policy
and the relationship with justice and sustainable development that can be leveraged to strengthen action.

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.