Modelling tools are becoming increasingly important to policy makers for creating transition pathways. More detail is required as the pace of change accelerates. Yet complexity is increasing as new technologies and solutions come online. And those models are needed at the local level, not just the national and global. It’s why the EU is funding, through Horizon 2020, a range of projects to not only make those tools a success, but make them freely available to all, explains Helen Farrell at the ECECP. She highlights five projects. COACCH models the effect on economies of flooding, and other such risks. EUCalc includes modelling for individual lifestyle changes as the technology mix evolves. LOCOMOTION draws on other models to increase the level of detail and extend geographical coverage. The OPEN ENTRANCE project assesses and optimises low-carbon transition pathways. SENTINEL enables modelling at the local level. Farrell makes the case that good modelling is not only a benefit to policy makers but can reassure and help win over citizens and businesses too to the great transformations ahead of us.
Global challenges require global solutions. Yet in a world where competition has long been lauded as the route to riches, companies and countries are too often averse to opening up their wealth of knowledge and experience to others for the common good.
The common goal, of limiting global warming to well below 2˚C requires a level of cooperation that the world has never seen before. Is it right for companies and nations to profit from their climate successes, and so hold back the progress towards climate neutrality? Rather, they have an obligation to share the progress they have made, so the collective movement towards net zero can be accelerated.
EU-funded open-source modelling
The EU is committed to becoming climate-neutral by 2050 to fulfil its commitment to the Paris Agreement. It recently published the results of 14 research projects that have developed models and tools that can assess the benefits, costs and trade-offs associated with the transition to climate neutrality. Many of them feature open-source software that has the potential not only to benefit nations and companies who are planning their own routes to climate neutrality, but can also be developed and improved in the years ahead by subsequent research from around the globe. Funding for the projects has come from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding programme.
Open-source tools are software tools that are freely available without a commercial licence. These tools are built to retain data, are low cost, and facilitate monitoring and the gathering of data. In the private sector, there is a noticeable change in companies’ attitudes when it comes to applying an open-source philosophy. For example, Elon Musk has made Tesla’s patents open source, rendering the technology readily usable by anyone to spur innovation in the development of electric vehicles. ECECP has looked at some of the research topics that the EU has funded and whose results will be available to climate scientists around the world.
Effect on economies of flooding, etc.
The COACCH team – CO-designing the Assessment of Climate Change Costs – set out to identify regions most at risk from climate change, and to provide indicators for policy action. It has developed focused assessments of the risks and costs of climate change in Europe.
What is unique about their approach is their ‘inverted approach’ to analysis. The team started from local social and economic shocks, such as localised production losses, price increases or job losses, and then worked their way backwards, to assess the climatic conditions that led to these shocks. That approach helped them to identify the root causes of local climate events, such as flooding in homes and business premises.
The COACCH project includes an open-source web interface which will allow anyone access to the project data, assumptions and results, so that researchers can download and explore all of COACCH’s results. The hope is that this publicly available data will help research communities to improve their models and result in more effective mitigation and adaptation policies.
If subsequent researchers do, as anticipated, tap into the data compiled, then the project will become a building block in the global search for effective models and ways to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Website: www.coacch.eu
Individual lifestyle changes
‘Net zero’ is a phrase that is flung around with abandon by politicians and journalists alike. But what will people’s lives and jobs look like in a world with net zero carbon emissions? The EU-funded EUCalc project has built an interactive pathways explorer to show how the Paris Agreement objectives will affect citizens around the world.
The project offers policy makers, business owners, scientists and everyday citizens access to interactive charts and information on the work under way to achieve climate neutrality. They can see how actions taken in Europe benefit the world as a whole, and they can compare scenarios where the rest of the world does, or does not, follow suit.
The EUCalc team of 13 institutions, coordinated by the Potsdam institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, has designed the model and tools so they can be accessible to as many people as possible. It looks not only at the impact of technology, but also lifestyle changes. ‘We know that technological progress alone is not sufficient to reach net zero in 2050, so EUCalc systematically considers the role of lifestyle changes in supporting the decarbonisation of Europe,’ explains project coordinator Juergen Kropp.
The idea is that an individual can see how their own efforts can contribute to the global effort to reduce emissions. The tool looks at terms such as distance travelled each year, type of transport, or amount of food wasted. It aims to show that significant lifestyle changes, if widely adopted, could result in emissions savings of 60% by 2050.
This powerful tool does an impressive job given the amount of data it is able to process. To the average citizen, the wealth of information may be overwhelming, and it is not easy to see the effect of an individual’s lifestyle changes, only the overall impact of general lifestyle change on a sector. However, it is a welcome step towards involving the general public in the climate discourse, which is all too often conducted at many removes from the average citizen.
Website: tool.european-calculator.eu/intro
Improving open source modelling
Access to reliable and practical modelling systems that can assess the feasibility, effectiveness, costs and impacts of different policy actions is vital if companies and governments are to reach informed decisions about the most appropriate pathways to climate neutrality.
The LOCOMOTION (Low-carbon society: an enhanced modelling tool for the transition to sustainability) project, coordinated by the University of Valladolid in Spain, is compiling an open-source software in Python which will offer an improved model that draws on other models such as World6, LEAP, GCAM and C-Roads, with an increased level of detail and greater geographical coverage. It has created a new worldwide multiregional model with seven global regions and the integration of the 27 EU Member States.
The project will end in 2023, but the project’s findings will be available to scientists and modelling experts in future, with a second interface aimed at non-scientists to provide a user-friendly decision support tool for policy makers.
Website: locomotion-h2020.eu
Pathways to low carbon economies
The shift towards renewable and clean energy sources is set to be supported by an EU-funded Open ENTRANCE project – an open-source platform for assessing low-carbon transition pathways.
This four-year project, coordinated by Sintef Energi in Norway, has developed four scenarios for low-carbon energy futures at a pan-European and national level, covering subsequent 1.5˚C and 2.0˚C global temperature increases.
It includes case studies on topics such as how energy flexibility in households will impact investment needs at a European level and how optimal use of energy among communities will impact the overall load profile.
The information is to remain available in an open-source format for the next 10 years. This way, the platform can be reused and further developed by the scientific community, and the datasets used in other carbon transition research. The project is due to finish in 2023.
Website: openentrance.eu
Regional-level modelling
Another modelling solution featured in the CORDIS Results Pack is the SENTINEL project, which has taken a modular approach to energy modelling. ‘Policy makers need to know the economic, social and environmental implications of the difference choices that they face today,’ explains Anthony Patt, professor of Climate Policy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, which coordinates the project. ‘We focus on answering these questions not with a single model that is so large and complicated as to be a mysterious black box, but rather by pulling together a set of small, transparent, open-source models and data that can precisely meet their needs.’
The team aims to make these models available for download with clear instructions on how to use them in combination.
Once again, the online platform will remain available after the end of the project’s funding period and will remain as a hub for community users who will help to improve the tool by sharing feedback and data. The aim is for SENTINEL to develop as a widely used resource for decades to come.
Website: sentinel.energy
Accessible models can help win over citizens, businesses
According to research published by Sky and the UK-based Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in November 2021, 70% of people across Europe are willing to change their behaviour to address the climate crisis.
Yet without access to information about what changes are necessary, and what impact they will have, that willingness may vanish into a sea of apathy. The same applies to companies: there is a general acceptance of the need to implement climate-friendly changes to current practice, but how are start-ups and SMEs to find out about and choose between the technologies on offer? How are they to learn what grants, incubators and policy support exist to support them? And when technology is protected by patents, how can that encourage widespread adoption of that technology?
Governments bear a heavy responsibility to reach out to individual consumers, climate innovators and investors, and create policies that will support action to reduce carbon emissions.
By funding these projects, many of which advocate and espouse open-source data, the EU shows that it is happy to contribute to the development of a global understanding of the challenges ahead, and aware of the need to cooperate and share information in order to avert a climate disaster.
The projects highlighted here are part of the CORDIS Results Pack, a suite of 14 research projects funded by the EU through its Horizon 2020 programme, which have developed a suite of models and tools that are able to assess the benefits, costs, risks, trade-offs and synergies with other policy objectives of strategies and investments associated with the transition to climate neutrality. For more information about these and the other projects in this Results Pack, please follow this link.
Examples of open-source solutions that changed the world
Penicillin – The most efficacious life-saving drug in the world and one of the first medications that were effective against bacterial infections. The group of antibiotics were discovered by Alexander Fleming, who chose not to patent the drug: ‘I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.’
World Wide Web (WWW) – The information system that provides web resources with an individually authenticatable address, also known as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and transferred via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The code of the WWW was written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who wanted to make it open accessible to all: ‘Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.’
Linux – The collaborative open-source operating system was first developed by Linus Torvalds, a leading supporter of Open Source software. In an article about Linus Torvalds from 2003, Wired magazine wrote: ‘He posted it on the Internet and invited other programmers to improve it. Since then, tens of thousands of them have, making Linux perhaps the single largest collaborative project in the planet’s history.’
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/linus-torvalds
Ubuntu – The project was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, who wanted to create an easy-to-use Linux desktop operating system. A combination of commercial teams and a volunteer community collaborate to create high quality releases on a predictable cadence.
Microsoft – The global leading provider of computer software and hardware is not the first to come to mind when thinking about open source. Since Microsoft began experimenting with ‘shared source’ in 2002, it has become an enthusiastic supporter of Linux and has built up a powerful open-source strategy. In 2018, Microsoft joined the Open Innovation Network and has cross-licensed 60,000 patents with the open-source community.
https://boxofcables.dev/microsoft-and-open-source-an-unofficial-timeline/
Summarised by Helena Uhde, ECECP Junior Postgraduate Fellow
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Helen Farrell is the Editor of the EU China Energy Magazine for the EU-China Energy Cooperation Platform (ECECP)
This article was first published in the EU-China Energy Magazine – 2022 February Issue, available in English and Chinese, and is published here with permission