Massimo Tavoni, Full Professor of climate economics at the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, is the winner of the ERC Consolidator Grant with the EUNICE project, which aims to reduce uncertainties in climate stabilisation pathways.
Massimo Tavoni, Professor at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano and Director of the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), is one of the winners of the 2022 edition of the ERC Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the first pan-European organisation for frontier research.
Professor Tavoni’s research was selected from over two thousand proposals submitted to ERC, which aims to foster scientific excellence by supporting and encouraging competition for funding among the best and most original researchers.
In detail, EUNICE aims to correct errors and biases in the ensembles of climate-energy-economic models that study climate stabilisation, and to develop ways to validate and confirm scenario insights.
The main objective of the project is therefore to develop an innovative and integrated approach to quantify, translate and communicate in an effective and prompt way the main uncertainties associated with low-carbon pathways and scenarios that explore very distant futures, renewing the methodological and experimental bases of model-based climate assessments. Three key objectives for three main research lines: extending current scenarios to the “deep” future and quantifying their uncertainties; removing errors and biases from scenarios to account for short-term disruptions (e.g. extreme and unexpected events); translating maps of the future provided by models into robust and reliable guidelines; and testing how to communicate these in the most effective and timely way.
EUNICE is a project of great relevance also for other research areas: indeed the approach and innovations developed by EUNICE can also be applied to other high-risk environmental, social and technological assessments. Its unique combination of computational and behavioural science and public engagement will be an important mediation tool in debates on fundamental decisions for our society, increasing confidence in and recognition of the scientific method.
For more information on ERC Consolidator Grants 2022: https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2021-consolidator-grants-results
