Description
As the scale of European activities on both mitigation and adaptation grows, mainstreaming them across all EU policy sectors becomes increasingly important. The RESPONSES project is a collaborative research project funded by the EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7) that intends to scope out the way forward for the EU to bring about deep emissions reductions and mainstream mitigation and adaptation.

Its main goals are to:
  • develop new global low emissions scenarios, placing EU efforts in a global context;
  •  build an approach for assessing EU policies against mitigation and adaptation objectives and for developing alternative policy options;
  •  apply this framework in five EU policy sectors (water and agriculture, biodiversity, regional development/infrastructure, health and energy), linked by a set of cross-sectoral integrative activities;
  •  and synthesise the results to new policy strategies.

The main outputs of the project will be:
  •  a set of global low emission scenarios, differentiated by key countries;
  •  options and strategies for integrating mitigation and resilience to climate impacts into EU policies;
  •  a validated strategic climate assessment approach.

IIASA leads the water and agriculture work package, which will generate and assess options for improving water policy in the European Union given the need to respond to climate change, by focusing on a case study of the water-food system in the Upper Warta river basin in western Poland.

Furthermore, IIASA contributes to the energy, the regional development and infrastructure work packages, as well as to the design of the research protocol and to the synthesis of sectoral outputs.

Further details about the project and information on current progress can be found at the project’s web site (link to http://www.responsesproject.eu/ ).

Funding agency:
European Commission

Project time frame:
January 2010 to December 2012

Partners:
Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), VU University Amsterdam
University of East Anglia (UEA)
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL)
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovations Research (ISI)
Commission of the European Communities, Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Biochange Lab, Madrid (CSIC) Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Policy and Management (CAS-IPM)
The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)

IIASA Researchers:
Anna Dubel
Susanne Hanger
Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer
Reinhard Mechler
Anthony Patt
Stefan Pfenninger
Jan Sendzimir

For more information, please contact: Stefan Pfenninger

Responsible for this page: Jun Watabe
Last updated: 24 Feb 2011