CIRCOMOD: Circular Economy Modelling for Climate Change Mitigation
Supporting policy making for circular economy and climate change mitigation with advanced quantitative modelling research.
Decarbonizing the production and consumption of products and materials plays a critical role in reaching ambitious climate targets. Consequently, a new circular economic system aiming to reduce primary material use (in addition to energy efficiency and fuel shifts) can address both Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHGs) and increase resource efficiency. However, current GHG mitigation models and scenarios informing climate policymakers generally do not include circular economy (CE) options, nor do they cover the possible synergies of CE with other societal goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or the challenges involved in rearranging value chains and consumer behavior. CIRCOMOD addresses these challenges by developing a new generation of advanced models and scenarios that will assess how CE can reduce future GHGs and material use.
TiU TSC researchers have joined forces with other prominent teams of modelers under CIRCOMOD, forming a unique cross-disciplinary family including industrial ecology and material flow modeling, process-oriented integrated assessment modeling, and macro-economic modeling. The team aims for a breakthrough in integrating CE and GHG mitigation assessments by developing an analytical framework that maps circular economy strategies to existing influential climate scenarios, providing robust and timely CE data in an open repository, and improving the representation of the CE in leading models used by European and global institutions while strengthening links between the models. These key scientific breakthroughs enable robust scientific assessments in collaboration with stakeholders across policy and industry. It will provide timely input to international assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Resource Panel (IRP). CIRCOMOD will provide actionable insights into the circular economy and help address one of the largest challenges of the coming decades.
The TSC team involved in CIRCOMOD is represented by Reyer Gerlagh, Julie Metta and Asel Doranova. Etienne Lorang, who has been involved in the project since its beginning, is now complementing it with his MSCA fellowship project IAM-Circ.
CIRCOMOD project has received funding from the Horizon Europe research and innovation program of the European Union under the grant agreement No 101056868.
