Energy Program to Kick Start CD-LINKS Project on Climate and Development Research

IIASA's Energy Program is leading the project's consortium. The core objective of the project is to develop national and global transformation pathways, namely potential storylines that show how climate change mitigation could occur in conjunction with sustainable development objectives – and what trade-offs and synergies will emerge between the interlinked goals. Uniquely, the storylines will include local case studies, which will be linked with global pathways to ensure consistency in calculating factors such as energy use, fuel prices, and trade of carbon emission permits. The CD-LINKS project will fill the critical knowledge gap and provide much-needed information for designing complementary climate-development policies.

CD-LINKS has four overarching goals: (i) to gain an improved understanding of the linkages between climate change policies (mitigation/adaptation) and multiple sustainable development objectives, (ii) to broaden the evidence base in the area of policy effectiveness by exploring past and current policy experiences, (iii) to develop the next generation of globally consistent, national low-carbon development pathways, and (iv) to establish a research network and capacity building platform in order to leverage knowledge-exchange among institutions from Europe and other key players within the G20. Through six highly integrated work packages – from empirical research to model and scenario development – CD-LINKS will advance the state-of-the-art of climate-development policy analysis and modelling in a number of areas.

While the project is funded by the European Commission, it has a unique consortium of partners, comprised of European institutes and collaborators from China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia, Korea and the US. 

Last edited: 27 September 2015