Impact

Expected impacts listed in the work programme

The expected impact as stated in the FP7 work programme is the identification of policy portfolios for effective adaptation/mitigation and prioritisation of research needs in EU and international funding programs in support of the implementation of a post-2012 climate change agreement in developing countries and/or emerging economies.

Fighting climate change is a global challenge requiring the willing participation of all countries. The development of a viable portfolio of policy options for international climate policy can therefore not be done from a national or even European perspective. It requires the integration of Southern viewpoints as an integral and equally valid part of the equation.
The key measure foreseen in this project to develop a viable portfolio of policy options is therefore the inclusion of competent project partners from developing countries in a key role. They will contribute to the process by providing substantial inputs in the form of discussion papers, participating in workshops, and joining hands in collaboratively developing climate policy architectures.
The inclusion of Southern partners will also ensure that full consideration is taken of the geographic specifications, socio-economic framework conditions and the current status of climate policy in their respective countries. They will make information on these factors available to the other project partners in the form of background papers and make sure that they are taken fully into account through their active participation in the collaborative development of policy options.
The project will also reach out to other national experts and stakeholders in developing countries by discussing preliminary project proposals in national expert workshops. Through this process, it will be further ensured that national framework conditions and Southern viewpoints are taken into account.
The project consortium also includes three European partners with a very strong background in climate policy development.
As key impact, the project will thus ensure that a portfolio of policy options and research needs is submitted to the European Commission which is practically feasible and acceptable from a European as well as from a Southern perspective.
As a further impact, the project will disseminate these proposals widely. The first means of dissemination will be the workshops and international conferences. In addition, a project website will be established to make all material produced by the project, including the background and discussion papers, electronically available to the whole world. Regular alerts to new content on the project website will be sent out via listservers, such as the Climate-L listserver run by the Canadian International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which alone has thousands of subscribers.
Another impact achieved by the inclusion of Southern partners, workshops and the conferences is to further expand and strengthen the international network of climate policy researchers and practitioners. By having national-level workshops, international conferences, and side events at the Conferences of the Parties to the UNFCCC, the project will bring a very large number of people into contact with each other who have strong roles to play in the future of climate policy. The project will thus establish a very solid foundation for further climate policy implementation or research activities.
Through the inclusion of Southern partners and other experts, the wide dissemination and the networking, as a further impact the project will also contribute to the development of a shared international perspective of what direction future climate policy should take. So far Northern and Southern negotiators are still very much dug into trenches where they require that the other side should go first. The development of a shared perspective and sense of purpose will therefore be key to overcoming the climate challenge. The project will contribute to some albeit necessarily only limited extent to the development of such a shared perspective.
All consortium partners have a very strong working record on national and international climate policy and have in the past already made important contributions to its further development, as briefly outlined in Section 2.2. The consortium therefore has a good overview of other national and international research areas in this field. Through their substantial climate policy research that will be ongoing in parallel to this project, the partners will be able to quickly become aware of new research results that are relevant for the project’s development of policy proposals. The key results of international climate policy research will be introduced into the policy development through the background and discussion papers to be elaborated as well as orally in the series of workshops to be organised.