As the world faces the risks of dangerous climate change, policy-makers, industry and civil society leaders are counting on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform and guide strategies to deliver on the objectives of the Paris Agreement (PA). ENGAGE rises to this challenge by engaging these stakeholders in co-producing a new generation of global and national decarbonisation pathways. These new pathways will supplement natural science, engineering and economics, traditionally represented in IAMs, with cutting-edge insights from social science in order to reflect multidimensional feasibility of decarbonisation and identify opportunities to strengthen climate policies. The pathways will be designed to minimise overshoot of the temperature target and analyse the timing of net-zero emissions to meet the Paris temperature target and reduce the reliance on controversial negative emissions technologies. In addition, they will link national mitigation strategies of major emitters with the PA’s objectives, integrate potential game-changing innovations, and advance conceptually novel approaches to architectures of international climate agreements. ENGAGE will also quantify avoided impacts of climate change, co-benefits and trade-offs of climate policy, and identify the biggest sectoral opportunities for climate change mitigation. In ENGAGE, we will set new standards of transparency for global and national IAMs. The new pathways will be developed in an iterative global and national stakeholder process and a consortium of leading global and national IAMs and social scientists. This co-production process ensures that the pathways are credible, legitimate, and rooted in concrete policy and industry experience, making them relevant to inform the 2023 global stocktake and feed into the mid-century strategies of major emitters.

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.