CAPABLE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and carried out by a transdisciplinary European consortium consisting of 10 partner institutions and universities across Europe and is coordinated by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). CAPABLE will provide robust, resilient and actionable recommendations for the design of socially and economically acceptable climate policy measures for 2030 and beyond.

General Objectives

The overall aim of CAPABLE is to develop and operationalize multi-objective decision making frameworks to help evaluate effective, yet socially and politically feasible, climate and environmental policies in Europe.

This will be accomplished through five objectives:

1. Develop new methods for socio-economic decision-making, addressing issues of deep uncertainty, social heterogeneity of actors, behavioural responses and biases, and multi- objective welfare measurement.
2. Enhance the empirical knowledge of public perceptions of climate policies, in particular on determinants of public support and opposition driving the political feasibility of climate policies.
3. Synthesize the rich literature on climate policy impact evaluation, with a focus on policy implementation and sequencing, and inform policies of the Fit for 55 package with the best available scientific evidence.
4. Analyse the role of policymakers at various levels, from the European and national levels to regional city levels, as well as recent citizen engagement initiatives.
5. Design actionable and effective climate policy recommendations to be disseminated and exploited, and develop an online policy evaluation tool.

Expected Results

CAPABLE will examine past experience, policy design and implementation solutions to identify strategies that can enable a successful transition. We will achieve this by addressing climate, economic, and social challenges. In order to do so, we will draw on economic methods of decision making and policy evaluation, and sociology, political sciences and psychology to capture the multidimensional outcomes and implications of different climate policy instruments. Moreover, we will produce a number of new datasets, and apply state-of-the-art methods to produce new insights on policy perception and performance. Finally, we will integrate the scientific evidence, an interactive stakeholder dialogue, and various dissemination channels including a new online policy tool as a user-oriented service for climate policy-makers at the EU, national, and local level. Taken together, the methodological and empirical advancements will provide broader evidence for desirable climate strategies in Europe, along with lessons for the
rest of the world.