It is often said that actions speak louder than words and in LOCALISED we believe an action-oriented approach to climate planning can help regions and communities achieve their climate goals.

Researchers from the Institute for Techno-economic Systems Analysis (IEK-3) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) recently presented an approach to modeling regional climate actions at the 17^th IAEE European Energy Conference on September 24^th, 2022. As past discussions on decarbonization have been muddied by disagreements on what an effective counteractive pathway may be [1], the LOCALISED method looks at the geographic, social, and economic aspects of a region to form an idea of how their climate vulnerabilities may be challenged. These aspects are combined with a counteractive measure database that collects mitigative and adaptive climate actions from literature and climate action plans in the EU. Ineffective or unfit measures for a region are filtered from the database to create a regionalized portfolio of actions and a genetic optimization framework is used to extract best-case measure scenarios. Resources and costs of implementing measures are balanced against their anticipated benefits and the resulting scenarios may be used as a foundation for stakeholders to begin or accelerate climate discussions in their community.

In the project’s early stages, an initial proof of concept tested this approach using a simple measure database to analyze climate actions in Germany. Initial results were positive and once it was determined the method was capable, development of a production version began. Expanded measure sets were introduced and current model iterations are able to analyze cross-sector mitigation measures in EU, NUTS-3 regions to locate optimal pathways or align measures with downscaled national decarbonization pathways. Future iterations will integrate adaptive measures to combat climate impact risks and the full EU results, measure database, and model platform made open access for end users. Following the development stages, an interactive feedback process with the project’s city partners will ensure useful information is ultimately provided to the stakeholders.

Further upcoming talks and papers will be published on the LOCALISED website so stay tuned to keep up to date!

References:

[1] Lowes, R. and Woodman, B. (2020). Disruptive and uncertain: Policy makers’ perceptions on UK heat decarbonisation. Energy Policy, 142, p.111494.