The 1^st PARIS REINFORCE Stakeholder Council Dialogue workshop, entitled "Enhancing climate policy through co-creation", took place on the 21^st of November 2019, at the premises of Bruegel, in Brussels, Belgium.

The workshop was a Pan-European initiative for the co-creation of research underpinning new climate policies at the EU and national levels, drawing from the results of six-month exhaustive consultations at national and European level, which followed innovative participatory processes, under the Talanoa Dialogue spirit also adopted in the recent UN Climate Change Conferences.

High level staff of the EC Directorates–General (DGs) for Energy, Climate, and Research, Ministries and climate–related governmental bodies from EU Member States, representatives of international organisations, scientists, and researchers representing relevant projects and initiatives attended the workshop.

During the morning sessions, and after opening remarks from Mr. Lukasz Kolinski (Head of Unit, DG ENER.A.4) as well as an introduction to the project by the Coordinator Dr. Haris Doukas (Assoc. Prof., National Technical University of Athens), a detailed policy brief on what the PARIS REINFORCE models can and cannot do was handed out, presented and discussed with stakeholders. Furthermore, the I²AM PARIS platform was thoroughly presented and discussed with the audience, with the session essentially showcasing the dynamic, detailed and comparative documentation component of the platform (to which the audience was provided access to) and leading to a large Q&A part, in which preferences over the content, design and directions for the modelling analyses visualisation were gathered.

The afternoon consultation, broken down into three thematic sessions, resulted in the main policy questions to be further investigated by the ensemble of Integrated Assessment Models of PARIS REINFORCE, by participating stakeholders prioritising the topics they would like to discuss in detail with the consortium members and, after discussions, selecting the particular policy questions they would like PARIS REINFORCE to seek to address, via a polling and voting platform. The lists of suggested topics for each session were put together after discussions with high-level policymakers at the EU and European-national level as well as included one question (per session) that drew from recommendations from the public, in a crowdsourcing platform that was set up for the purposes of the workshop

At the global level, stakeholders appeared in favour of the project taking on topics and policy questions that revoled around potential failures of key technologies, lifestyle and behavioural changes, as well as just transitions in a climate emergency or extreme decarbonisation potential under a green new deal. At the EU level, the most interesting topics included carbon border adjustment and alternatives, capacity and flexibility of electrification in Europe, and EU-internal taxation policies (increasing ambition in terms of ETS coverage and expanding harmonisation of taxation in non-ETS sectors). Finally, on the socioeconomic and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) front, participants eventually voted in favour of the project taking on questions related to employment and other socio-economic dimensions resulting from removing public support on emissions-intensive sectors (e.g. coal); evolution in terms of sectoral redeployment and skill requirements; and increasing ambition in NDCs in consideration of various sustainability dimensions.

This workshop was the first of a series of stakeholder events to be held over the next three years.

You may find the agenda here, and download the presentations below.

An introduction to PARIS REINFORCE

Can our models deliver what you need?

Co-designing the open-access, data-exchange I²AM PARIS platform

Global threat, global pathways: designing policy-relevant scenarios

A Paris-consistent Europe: aligning national (NECPs), regional (EU NDC) & global action

Sustainable climate action: socioeconomic implications, distributional effects & SDGs

Wrap-up & Next Steps