In recent years an unprecedented number of voluntary climate commitments have been made by a wide array of non-state and subnational actors. These voluntary climate actions aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience and are crucial for lowering risks of exceeding warming limits. However, the full potential of voluntary climate action can only be realised when integrity-related concerns are overcome. ACHIEVE aims to identify opportunities to strengthen and scale up high-integrity voluntary climate action towards achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century. The project will generate transformative and timely scientific insights on the role, effectiveness and integrity of voluntary climate action including carbon credits; assess the integrity and impacts of such action; analyse how policies and regulations, and high-integrity voluntary climate action can strengthen each other; and use scientific findings to support the scaling up of high-integrity voluntary action. This will be achieved through a highly inter- and transdisciplinary consortium that, from the start, actively engages policymakers and other societal stakeholders in co-creating outcomes that respond to end users’ needs. ACHIEVE is aligned with the Work Programme of Cluster 5, Destination 1 “Climate sciences and responses for the transformation towards climate neutrality” as the project directly contributes to advancing knowledge and providing solutions for climate change specifically on high integrity voluntary climate action. ACHIEVE will develop transition pathways to climate neutrality that integrate voluntary climate action by cities, regions and companies; it will develop novel social science insights for climate action; contribute to better understanding sustainability co-benefits and trade-offs; and increase transparency and trust in voluntary climate action by strengthening integrity and making scientific results easily accessible for different stakeholder groups.

There is an urgent need to strengthen collective action to limit global warming to levels consistent with the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement. The NEWPATHWAYS project aims to inform solutions to strengthen action by developing and analysing next-generation Paris-aligned global and national low-emission transformation pathways for the next global stocktake in 2028. The project objectives are to promote enhanced transparency, consistency, and clarity of GHG emission reduction commitments, identify opportunities to leverage equity and finance to strengthen collective climate action, and establish new national and global transformation pathways that limit temporary overshoot, rely on deep sectoral transformations, combine climate and nature protection, and are aligned with sustainable development and just transition objectives. The project will rely on a multi-level stakeholder dialogue to co-create knowledge and build user capacity to maximize relevance and uptake of its results. The NEWPATHWAYS consortium combines strong global and national pathway modelling capacity with expertise from the social sciences, economics and policy analysis. National modelling teams come from a diverse set of countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe covering two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. The robust global and diverse national modelling capabilities with simultaneous access to global and national policy debates will prove effective in providing critical information to global and national policymakers and stakeholders for strengthening climate action towards achieving the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement.

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. This allows a new generation of global and national mitigation scenarios, exploring the possibility of strengthening climate policies in countries worldwide and support net-zero goals. We assess the impact of different ways to formulate net-zero goals and the impact of climate uncertainty. Outcomes include detailed pathways and milestones on how policies can be strengthened to achieving net-zero goals. ELEVATE goes 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.

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.