CARISMA – Coordination and Assessment of Research and Innovation in Support of climate Mitigation Actions

Background

The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 was a major step forward in moving the global society towards a low carbon development pathway to limit global warming to 2°C or even 1.5°C. Meeting those targets and curbing CO2 emissions require tremendous efforts on many levels since technological, societal, political and economic barriers have to be overcome. Solutions to face those challenges and options to mitigate the effects of climate change often already exist, yet for several reasons they do not enter the political mainstream.

CARISMA aims to understand those reasons and will propose tools to overcome barriers that hinder effective climate change mitigation. Through a continuous engagement with a large variety of stakeholders from the private and public sector, CARISMA has several objectives:

First, CARISMA aims to contribute to research and cooperation efforts by assessing climate change mitigation options and by matching knowledge needs of stakeholders such as policy makers, business representatives or NGOs with information already available.

Second, CARISMA seeks to benefit actual mitigation efforts by improving the analysis of policies implementing those mitigation options.

As a third step, CARISMA will look at lessons learnt and best practice examples of mitigation options and their implementing policies and how this knowledge could be transferred and made useful to developing countries.

SEI’s role in CARISMA

SEI leads a work package on climate change mitigation policies and significantly contributes to several other work packages. We particularly look at information available on climate change mitigation policies and try to make this information useful for policy makers, as well as business or NGO stakeholders. Furthermore, SEI staff’s strong competencies on governance questions allow us to make significant contributions throughout the project while our strong regional expertise will be drawn upon in the second half of the project when working on the diffusion of policies to developing countries.