The proposal on the EU Climate and Energy Package of the European Commission

On 23 January 2008 the European Commission put forth an integrated proposal for Climate Action. This climate and energy package aims at decreasing the EU's greenhouse gases by 20% in 2020 compared to 1990 and at increasing the share of renewable energy in energy consumption to 20% by 2020.  

To inform the Commission in developing the quantitative proposal for climate action, and in particular on the sharing of involved efforts among Member States, IIASA has employed its GAINS (Greenhouse gas - Air pollution Interactions and Synergies) model to estimate the likely potential and costs of further mitigation measures of non-CO2 greenhouse gases. As a starting point, the assessment has assumed for 2020 the national projections of emission generating activities that have been provided to IIASA by the Member States in 2006 in the course of the revision of the NEC directive.

This quantitative information, together with a study on the potentials and costs for mitigating CO2 emissions conducted by the National University of Athens, has been used by the European Commission to propose targets and mechanisms for the sharing of efforts among the 27 Member States. The methodology employed by the Commission for developing the quantiative proposal is described in the Impact Assessment accompanying the implementation measures for the EU's objectives on climate change and renewable energy for 2020

This web site provides access to:

• the report documenting modelling methodology and aggregated results ("Emission scenarios for non-CO2 greenhouse gases in the EU-27: Mitigation potentials and costs in 2020"),
• an excel file with cost-curves for all 27 Member States for mitigating non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 below the baseline projections,
• instructions on how to extract all underlying quantitative assumptions and detailed emission estimates of the baseline projection from the on-line version of the GAINS model.

Responsible for this page: Markus Amann
Last updated: 12 Dec 2008