CLIMATE RECON 2050 – Intra-EU Exchange to Raise Awareness and Build Capacity on Long-Term Climate Strategies

Long-term climate strategies for 2050 are a central thread of discussion in the European Union (EU). Under the Paris Agreement, all EU Member States had to develop their own national strategies, but with little central guidance and no overarching structure for cooperation.

Despite existing political commitments (e.g. Paris Agreement, Energy Union), by 2017 only a minority of EU Member States had formulated a robust long-term climate strategy – and those that existed varied in scope and level of detail. The project aimed to fill a gap in the landscape of existing political-technical processes and to support national planning processes.

Climate Recon 2050: 1st Meeting of the Technical Dialogue, Berlin, April 2018

Climate Recon brought together policy makers and technical experts from EU Member States with an overarching goal: to support national long-term climate planning and the implementation of national long-term climate strategies (LTCSs), while contributing to the harmonisation of long-term climate strategies through action across the EU. The project aimed to organise dialogue workshops for government experts, conduct targeted comparative analyses of selected national LTCSs in the project's target regions, create opportunities for collaboration between relevant stakeholders by organising regional seminars in the target regions and to raise awareness on these issues.

The project consisted of a series of parallel workshops that brought together policy makers and modelling experts from across Europe and enabled the two groups to exchange experiences and best practices within and between the groups at workshops in Berlin, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris and Brussels. 

As a core group of Member States, the project received support from the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Italy, Poland and Germany. In addition, the project organised a series of events, webinars and publications aimed at presenting findings from the two forums to a wider audience, but also allowing interested stakeholders not directly involved in the project to contribute to the ongoing project.

• A wealth of experience: Nearly half of the EU Member States had already developed national long-term climate strategies (LTCS) within the past decade. With the Paris Agreement and its objectives serving as an impulse, some countries began to review existing strategies for an update in 2020 and started to plan towards net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 or earlier. Good practices existed for many procedural elements, including governance frameworks and stakeholder involvement.  
• Great diversity: The existing strategies differed in many respects, including content, degree of detail on specific measures, political ownership and legal form. This diversity reduced comparability. Moreover, some strategies did not deliver on the essential elements needed to manage the net-zero transformation. Accordingly, they could not provide a clear direction for near-term policies. The lack of a common guidance framework and low comparability posed obstacles to effective strategy development. Without losing sight of country-specific circumstances, a higher level of strategic alignment was needed and could take the form of a common fact base, regarding inter alia technological assumptions and options.  
• Common challenges: Similar issues arose across the EU both in policy-making and on a technical level. These included connections between the EU and national levels as well as coherence between near- and long-term policy-making—i.e., between the 2030 National Energy and Climate Plans (NECP) and 2050 LTCSs—to avoid carbon-intensive lock-ins and economic and social disruption. 

More about this project:

• www.ecologic.eu/de
• Find a brief document elaborating on the key findings here. 
• A Resource Library with project outputs can be found here.