Project

Fraunhofer Institute for
Systems and Innovation Research ISI

PACT - Pathways for Carbon Transitions

Most «business-as-usual scenarios» built up till now have shown that hydrocarbon resources scarcity and the growing release of greenhouse gases will bring the world far away from sustainability over the next decades. Then, deep changes in behaviours away from «BAU» are unavoidable long before the turn of the century in a move towards a post-carbon society.

Urbanisation and mobility are probably the domains where these changes might be the most important and they will be necessarily driven and limited by socio-economic and cultural forces that will dominate the century. They will induce further deep changes in behaviours of consumers and producers and are likely to deeply impact the use and production of bulk materials, large energy consumers and GHG emitters.

In this framework, the PACT project objective is to provide strategic decision-support information to decision makers to achieve these milestones. It will focus on 3 themes:
  • What shape the energy demand, and how this should evolve towards post-carbon concept, from the infrastructures viewpoint, in relation to urbanisation and land-use schemes, and that of the life-styles and behaviours, in relation to the available technologies.
  • The question of urbanisation and land-use from the renewable energy perspective, including that of the systems.
  • The role of social forces, actors, stakeholders in the transition process.
PACT will address these issues in two phases: first, by developing the necessary analytical and conceptual framework, second in attempting to quantify scenarios of post-carbon societies at EU and world level by 2050 and beyond, using enhanced versions of the VLEEM and POLES models.

The role of Fraunhofer ISI is to investigate the implications of land use changes for large scale energy and transport infrastructure in Europe. ISI will lead a Work Package on  Assessment of technologies to achieve a post-carbon society in housing, transport and energy services. These will be linked where possible with urban schemes and land use clusters .

Status

started Oct 1, 2008, to be completed Sept 30,  2011

Client

European Commission DG Research

Partners

Enerdata (coordinator), ArcelorMittal (ARSA), Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysics (IPP), Institute of Studies for the Integration of Systems (ISIS), Université P. Mendes France (UPMF), Laboratorio di Scienze della Cittadinanza (LSC), Mefos, University of Padua (UP), Turku School of Economics (TSE), EAV, Regional Centre for Energy Policy Research of the Corvinus University of Budapest (REKK)