INNOPATHS – Innovation Pathways, Strategies and Policies for the Low-Carbon Transition in Europe

INNOPATHS is a EU funded research project that aims to work with key economic and societal actors to generate new, state-of-the-art low-carbon pathways for the European Union by assessing the anatomy of existing scenario and pathway studies for the low-carbon transition from technical, economic and social perspectives. The project will then highlight how the benefits of these pathways, such as new industries, jobs and competitiveness, may be maximised, and how any negative impacts, such as those on low-income households, or on carbon-intensive sectors, may be mitigated. Moreover, detailed outputs from the project will be disseminated through four interactive ‘online tools’, providing decision-makers and other stakeholders with a vital resource for continuing analysis.

The project consists in:

1. analysing insights generated by previous low-carbon scenarios and pathway studies to identify the major challenges to the energy transition and the innovations that will be required to address them;

2. presenting a detailed assessment of low-carbon technologies, their uncertainties, future prospects and system characteristics. In doing so, it will undertake a comprehensive assessment of how low-carbon technologies have and may develop, and what role new technologies may play in the low-carbon transition;

3. proposing policy and innovation system reforms that will help the EU and Member States meet their greenhouse gas emission reduction targets;

4. creating new, co-designed deep decarbonisation pathways with novel representation of policy and innovation process for low-carbon technology development;

5. making explicit the economic, social and environmental impacts of these low-carbon pathways, and propose how innovative solutions in policy, law, regulation and institutional change can overcome the barriers to and maximise the benefits from the low-carbon transition.