The EU wants to transform itself to a low-carbon economy by mid-century. This transformation process will require an overhaul of the European economy, affecting a range of sectors – not only power generation, industry and transport, but also agriculture, construction or finance. Governing this transformation process is a huge challenge – stimulating the necessary innovations, ensuring public support, encouraging the needed investments, creating the right infrastructure, and avoiding lock-in into old, carbon-intensive technologies.

To manage this transformation, a range of policy instruments is required. The existing mix of climate policy instruments needs to be scaled up drastically to initiate the necessary changes. But as the scale and scope of instruments increases, it becomes more important to understand and to manage their interaction, as do constraints on the political, legal and administrative feasibility.

The CECILIA2050 project has been set up to address this challenge: over the course of three years, the project will conduct ex-post and ex-ante analyses of climate policies to understand how policy instruments work in interaction, what factors determine their performance, and how the European climate policy instrument mix should evolve to guide the transformation to a low-carbon economy. The project funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for Research (FP7).

The project consortium, consisting of ten academic institutions from eight EU countries, gathered in Berlin on 12-14 November for the project kick-off meeting. Discussion topics included the notion of “optimality” – what constitutes an optimal policy instrument mix, and how should pragmatic considerations such as public acceptance or political feasibility play into the assessment. It was also discussed how to align and coordinate the different quantitative and qualitative analytical tools that will be employed as part of the CECILIA2050, ranging from micro-level simulation to global macroeconomic models.

The project consortium is led by Ecologic Institute from Berlin as Project Coordinator with the following partners: University College London (UCL), Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University, Charles University Prague (CUNI), the Institute of Economic Structures Research (GWS) in Osnabrück/Germany, the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Free University of Amsterdam, Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environment et le Developpement (CIRED) in Paris, the University of Warsaw, the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) and the University of Ferrara (UNIFE).