ADAM Consortium

• 17 pages
• Not for Circulation
• Confidential

49 B The Case for Support
50
51
52 B.1 Relevance to the Objectives of the Sub-Priority
53
54 Climate change presents a new set of challenges for the development of public policy. This is
55 because the time-scales involved between policy implementation and desired outcome are
56 much longer than in other policy areas; because many areas of policy planning need
57 simultaneously to be addressed, therefore placing a greater demand on the integration of
58 policy across different realms; and because the truly global nature of the problem requires
59 national or regional policies to be designed within some framework of global strategy. These
60 challenges are true for all nations, yet are particularly acute for the European Union (EU)
61 given its leading role to date in the design of humanity’s response to our unprecedented
62 perturbation of the global climate.
63
64 Appropriate European climate change polic ies therefore need simultaneously to secure long65
term climate protection goals, to be integrated across multiple-sectors, and to be designed to
66 resonate with emerging international agreements and geo-political discourses. They must also
67 be acceptable to Europe’s citizens. These are challenging objective s which the EU is
68 nevertheless determined to meet. In order to do so, however, it will need to harness available
69 scientific expertise to identify, illuminate and appraise the available policy options. These
70 options must address the demands a de-stabilised climate will place on protecting citizens and
71 valued ecosystems – adaptation – as well as addressing the necessity to stabilise humankind’s
72 perturbation to global climate at a minimum desirable level whilst safeguarding and
73 transforming economic activities – mitigation. The appraisal of these options must recognise
74 the existence of multiple criteria, such as cost-benefit, cost effectiveness, equity, legitimacy
75 and environmental integrity. Such an appraisal must also identify where policy options can
76 contribute to both objectives – adaptation and mitigation – and where policy trade-offs may
77 emerge.
78
79 The core objectives of the research proposed by the ADAM (ADaptation And Mitigation)
80 Consortium are therefore:
81
82 · To assess the extent to which existing and evolving EU mitigation and adaptation
83 policies can achieve a tolerable transition (a ‘soft landing’) to a world with a global
84 climate no warmer than 2degC above pre- industrial levels, and to identify the costs and
85 effectiveness of these policies [mention 5degC somewhere?];
86 · To define a portfolio of strategic options for EU mitigation and adaptation policy
87 development in selected areas such as science and technology, energy, transport,
88 agriculture, infrastructures, trade, development assistance, natural resources
89 management and environmental protection that can address any shortfalls; and
90 · To develop a novel policy options appraisal framework and apply it to existing and
91 evolving policies and to new, long-term strategic policy options, so as to inform
92 European and international climate protection strategy in the context of post-2012
93 Kyoto negotiations.
94
95 The ADAM project will therefore lead to a better understanding of the complementarities,
96 trade-offs and distinctions that exist between adaptation and mitigation polic ies and policy
97 options, in the EU and internationally. A mature climate strategy will integrate mitigation and
98 adaptation policies and embed (mainstream) them within other non-climate policy realms. In
99 particular, the project will support EU policy development in the next stage of the
100 development of the UN FCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, in particular negotiations around a
101 post-2012 global climate policy regime, and will inform the emergence of new adaptation
102 strategies for Europe. In research on adaptation policy options, special attention will be paid
103 to the role of extreme events as both exposing vulnerability and as a signal for change.
104
105 In terms of policy development, the principal time horizon of the project will be from the
106 present to 2025, while the time horizon for policy appraisal will be out to 2100. The dominant
107 unit of analysis for the project will be the EU and its current member states, but will
108 specifically include global analyses where this clearly affects the interests of EU citizens and
109 states (for example, international emissions trading; development assistance, etc.). The
110 ADAM Consortium will work with a small number of 3rd Country collaborating partners (in
111 India, China and the USA) to ensure that our research is grounded in a global perspective.
112
113 The deliverables from this three-year ADAM project will be:
114
115 · D1: Improvements in economic modelling tools for use in analysing the effects and
116 costs of mitigation and adaptation options (including areas of technology dynamics,
117 innovation, spillovers, economic externa lities, and emissions trading within Europe).
118 · D2: blah, blah. Ottmar et al. to complete from cluster M2.
119 · D3: A quantitative assessment, including a digital atlas, of vulnerability to [average???
120 temperature] climate change in Europe, and proposed options for reducing this
121 vulnerability;
122 · D4: A quantitative assessment of Europe’s economic vulnerability to extreme weather
123 events, and proposed options for reducing this vulnerability by decreasing and sharing
124 disaster losses.
125 · D5: A novel policy options appraisal framework which uses both formal modelling and
126 deliberative processes to illuminate policy options according to multiple criteria.
127 · D6: An appraisal of EU’s current climate policy trajectory and the feasibility and cost
128 effectiveness of this trajectory in meeting emerging adaptation objectives and existing
129 mitigation goals.
130 · D7: An appraisal of a range of new (i.e., beyond business-as-usual) mitigation and
131 adaptation policy options as applied to four worked examples spanning a range of
132 scales and sectors, including post-2012 global climate regimes.
133
134 Meeting and delivering the research objectives stated above requires a major European
135 research effort such as can only be funded under an EU FP6 Integrated Project. All individual
136 member states in the EU recognise the dimensions of the challenges outlined above, and some
137 member states have research institutions which can tackle individual components of the
138 problem or can provide research underpinning of national climate policy planning. No
139 member state, however, even less any single institution, is capable of providing the integrated
140 research support that is needed at the level of European climate policy planning. Given the
141 breadth of disciplinary skills that are needed – e.g. economics, policy, climate science,
142 environmental science – together with the range of research tools that need to be deployed –
143 e.g. modelling, policy analysis, integrated assessment – a large-scale Integrated Project is the
144 most appropriate and effective research instrument in Europe that can deliver the stated
145 objectives. The ADAM Consortium brings together many of Europe’s leading national
146 research capacities which have not only been working at the climate science-policy interface
147 for many years, but all of whom share the same intellectual outlook of disciplinary integration
148 and policy relevance which such a project needs. The ADAM project will be able to exploit
149 many years of national and European research investment in climate change and build on these
150 institutional capacities to deliver a truly innovative and unique series of processes and
151 products in support of EU climate policy.

…

…

154 B.2 Potential Impact
155
156 Strategic impact
157 The top-level impact of the ADAM project will be improving the quality and relevance of
158 scientific contributions to the development and evaluation of climate change policy options
159 within the European Commission. This will help the Commission to deliver on its current
160 medium-term climate policy objectives and help inform its development of a longer-term
161 climate strategy in the context of (a) the UN FCCC and the post-2012 negotiations; and (b)
162 existing and emerging sectoral policy objectives within the EU.
163
164 The EU has a stated climate policy objective of stabilising global climate at no more than 2°C
165 above pre- industrial levels. This is equivalent to a further warming of no more than about
166 1.3°C above today’s temperature. Achieving this objective will probably require CO2
167 concentration to rise no higher than ~450ppmv. Reaching this goal will require contributions
168 from all the world’s industrialised and industrialising nations and will not be easily achieved.
169 Even under such a stabilised climate, Europe and the wider world will experience changes in
170 the frequency, distribution and severity of climate risks, some of which will cause
171 considerable loss of life, economic disruption and ecosystem damage. Under this scenario,
172 mitigation will present the major challenge, but serious attention to adaptation options will
173 also be needed.
174
175 A different scenario may see global temperature reach 5°C above pre- industrial levels by
176 2100, with a sea- level rise commitment of 1m or more in the next century. The risks
177 associated with extreme weather events in this scenario would be significantly greater than in
178 a 2°C warmer world and the danger of exceeding irreversible critical thresholds (e.g. melting
179 the Greenland ice sheet) will also be commensurately larger. Under this scenario, whilst
180 successful mitigation efforts may be restricted to a small number of nations, and perhaps only
181 be pursued half-heartedly elsewhere, the challenge for our societies to adapt to such large
182 changes in climate will be immense.
183
184 The world may well develop in a way that falls between these two futures, yet it is clear that
185 we will only safely navigate this coming century of climate change by paying serious attention
186 to combinations of policy options that both mitigate climate change and adapt society so as to
187 be better protected against the residual climate risks. It seems likely that many of these policy
188 challenges will take us well beyond those options currently in place or under negotiation. For
189 example, EU-15 greenhouse gas emissions in 2002 were only 2.9% below 1990 levels,
190 compared to the Kyoto target of 8% by 2008-2012. Indeed, to adequately address both the
191 mitigation and adaptation challenge is likely to require innovative technologies, new forms of
192 solidarity and loss sharing, entirely novel forms of policy intervention, and perhaps quite
193 radical transformations of our societies. The necessary transition from our current
194 development trajectories to those required for climate protection are not immediately obvious,
195 nor is it clear what combinations of changes in technology, behaviour, institutions and policy
196 would deliver them. Within Europe, this transition should be achieved without compromising
197 the objectives of the Gothenburg Declaration on sustainable development and the Lisbon
198 Strategy for European as an innovation-driven, knowledge-based economy.
199
200 The ADAM project, using the above diagnosis as a framing of the problem, will evaluate
201 Europe’s current predicament and develop portfolios of strategic climate policy options in
202 selected domains which will contribute to the achievement of long-term climate goals for
203 Europe and for the world. These portfolios will be subjected to a novel options appraisal
204 framework, paying especial attention to European competitiveness, cost effectiveness and
205 social justice. Such an appraisal framework will help inform the development of a sustainable
206 climate protection strategy for Europe, in the context of an evolving international climate
207 policy regime.
208
209 Innovation, exploitation, dissemination
210 The ADAM project will develop an innovative policy options appraisal framework (PAF) and
211 apply it to a number of strategic climate policy domains. We will also advance the current
212 generation of economic modelling tools that are used to evaluate climate policy options and
213 complete a quantitative vulnerability assessment for Europe. These tools, within the context
214 of the PAF, will allow for comparative analysis of mitigation and adaptation options, and an
215 examination of their interaction. Through our worked examples we will develop and appraise
216 a set of novel policy portfolios as applied to the challenges of climate change in Europe.
217
218 Our work will be informed by a cycle of six-monthly climate science-policy EU workshops
219 and we will hold a major final ADAM Conference in Brussels in the winter of 2008/09. The
220 six-monthly workshops will facilitate the dialogue between Europe’s climate policy
221 community and the ADAM Consortium which will shape and guide our work, and allow our
222 work to inform and support the EU negotiating process on climate change. Our work will be
223 reported to the international Framework Convention process through successive COP/MOP
224 events and to the wider scientific and policy communities through conventional science and
225 policy journals. Through our 3rd Country collaborators, the relevance and applicability of the
226 ADAM policy options appraisal framework in other world regions will be tested.

Share this: