There is an urgent need to strengthen collective action to limit global warming to levels consistent with the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement. The NEWPATHWAYS project aims to inform solutions to strengthen action by developing and analysing next-generation Paris-aligned global and national low-emission transformation pathways for the next global stocktake in 2028. The project objectives are to promote enhanced transparency, consistency, and clarity of GHG emission reduction commitments, identify opportunities to leverage equity and finance to strengthen collective climate action, and establish new national and global transformation pathways that limit temporary overshoot, rely on deep sectoral transformations, combine climate and nature protection, and are aligned with sustainable development and just transition objectives. The project will rely on a multi-level stakeholder dialogue to co-create knowledge and build user capacity to maximize relevance and uptake of its results. The NEWPATHWAYS consortium combines strong global and national pathway modelling capacity with expertise from the social sciences, economics and policy analysis. National modelling teams come from a diverse set of countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe covering two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. The robust global and diverse national modelling capabilities with simultaneous access to global and national policy debates will prove effective in providing critical information to global and national policymakers and stakeholders for strengthening climate action towards achieving the long-term objective of the Paris Agreement.

The NDC ASPECTS project will provide inputs to the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement (PA) and support the potential revision of existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the PA’s parties, as well as development of new NDCs for the post 2030 period. The project will particularly focus on four sectoral systems that are highly relevant in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions they produce yet have thus far made only limited progress in decarbonization. To advance these transformations will require to understand and leverage the Eigenlogic of those systems and take into account specific transformation challenges. These sectors are transport & mobility (land-based transport and international aviation & shipping), emission intensive industries, buildings, and agriculture, forestry & land-use, including their supply by and interaction with the energy conversion sector. For each of those sectors we will undertake „Sectoral Conversation“ to co-create evidence-based narratives with sectoral experts and stakeholders drawing on the consortium’s extensive networks. These narratives can then be translated into global pathways informing the Global Stocktake as well as national pathways for strategically selected countries for each of the four sectors. As an input to the Sectoral Conversations we will systematically assess transformation challenges and opportunities (economic, technological, political/institutional, capacity and awareness), including taking into account experiences with the implementation of the first round of NDCs as well as model-based quantitative analyses. Additionally, we will identify ways and means to improve international governance to enable and facilitate sectoral transformations.