NAVIGATE aims to develop the Next generation of AdVanced InteGrated Assessment modelling to support climaTE policy making. It will critically improve the capability of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform the design and evaluation of climate policies by targeting major advancements in two areas: describing transformative change in the economy, in technology and in consumer goods and services, and describing distributional impacts of climate change and climate policy. By tackling existing weaknesses and lack of capabilities of the current generation of IAMs, NAVIGATE will provide new insight into how long-term climate goals can translate into short-term policy action, and how countries and sectors can work in concert to implement the Paris Agreement. NAVIGATE is bringing together leading institutions in the field of integrated assessment modelling with leading domain experts. They will provide a broad and diverse collection of state-of-the-art tools ranging from domain specific models and data to an extensive set of flagship IAMs to foster a successful implementation of the project. NAVIGATE will engage in a concerted effort to increase the usability, transparency, legitimacy and hence uptake of IAM results. At the center of this will be a stakeholder dialogue to elicit user needs and engage in co-production of knowledge about IAMs and their uses. This will be accompanied by the development of methodologies to better assess the robustness of IAM results, by extended model documentation and new communication tools, and by capacity building efforts to lower the entrance barrier to IAM activities for other research teams, including research teams in less-developed countries. The NAVIGATE partners have long-standing expertise in national, EU and international climate policy advice and will actively promote uptake of project results by policy makers and international assessments.

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.