Objectives
The TRANSIENCE project will provide a consistent, open, and transparent model ecosystem to assess industrial circularity, decarbonisation, and sustainability in heterogeneous regional industrial clusters throughout Europe, in order to promote the co-production of knowledge in sustainability science, policy, and industry decision-making.
The project’s work programme will contribute to delivering on six, highly intertwined objectives (O):
Enhanced model capacity will be used to explore these links within the context of climate neutrality, focusing on Energy Intensive Industries (EIIs) and process industries. We will consider energy demand, use, and efficiency, emissions, resource use, sustainability of products across end-uses, alternative sourcing of materials and opportunities for material efficiency, industrial competitiveness via green products as well as their broad energy system and socio-economic impacts.
We will develop interfaces among a diverse series of interoperable modules, representing the industrial transformation and materials, product and end-use, energy-system, socioeconomic and climate, and environmental perspectives. Drawing from the capacities of five leading IAMs and sectoral models, altogether comprising a new, fully integrated model (MIC3), will clear the way towards an improved understanding of the role of industrial decarbonisation and circularity performance in the EU’s net-zero transition.
We will address key policy and industry relevant questions emerging from stakeholder dialogue across critical themes and promote industrial best practice by linking to and feeding into the Processes4Planet Impact Panel, to drive and de-risk industrial innovation. We will then test and validate the desirability and usability of the new modelling capabilities and results across the key end user groups (industry and policy) and geographic levels (EU, national, and sub-national/cluster) via two interfaces in the I2AM PARIS platform (one for experts and one for non-experts), four online workshops with the stakeholders of the regional clusters to collect impressions and ‘user stories’, and one EU-wide and cross-industry survey.
We will implement open science principles and establish model development pipelines, providing full access to the new modules and model produced (including code, interfaces, and data). Data used and produced will be FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), allowing to build and sustain a vibrant community of practice on industry-academia collaboration for knowledge valorisation and to document new modelling capacity for expert and non-expert audiences.
Guided by a transdisciplinary scientific approach, we will co-develop new technical capacity for a better understanding of European industry’s role in the net-zero transition, legitimising the implementation process in a transparent manner. Communication to and with the policy world, industry associations and clusters, and civil society will be optimised, allowing to translate the motives, concerns, and actions over decarbonisation, circularity performance, and overall sustainability in measurable, quantifiable terms.
An effective dissemination and exploitation mechanism will be established to boost the potential of our results and recommendations towards decarbonisation and circularity of industrial sectors as well as energy and policy assessments and prescriptions, and to build respective capacity across academia, EIIs, and the project's regional clusters in Spain, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands.