DIAMOND

Overview

Our group is part of the project "Delivering the next generation of Open Integrated Assessment Models for net-​zero, sustainable development" (DIAMOND) consisting of 19 consortium partners. external page DIAMOND is a Horizon Europe funded project aiming to deliver the next generation of open Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) for Net-​Zero sustainable development.

IAMs are computer simulations describing interactions between the climate and society. The interplay among climate mitigation, adaptation and between climate action and other development agendas, including sustainable resource use, requires an integrated ecosystem of disciplines, methods, and tools. IAMs provide that ecosystem, aiming to offer policy-relevant insights into global environmental change and sustainable development issues with quantitative descriptions of key processes in the human and earth systems and their interactions.

Despite the significant evolution of IAMs in the last decade, there remain several criticisms on their design, use, and adequacy to respond to questions on climate change adaptation and mitigation. Particular consideration needs to be given to making the models relevant (addressing the needs of stakeholder groups), open, transparent and accessible to the modelling community and stakeholders. To do so, the project will follow a transdisciplinary approach. The CSTS group is co-leading DIAMOND’s Work Package 2: Co-design, which implements this transdisciplinary process to achieve DIAMOND’s goals of updating, upgrading, and expanding six exemplary integrated assessment models. It will further enhance modelling capacity to assess the feasibility and desirability of Paris-​compliant mitigation pathways, their interplay with adaptation, circular economy, and other SDGs.

Approach and methods

Our approach follows three phases. Phase 1 (Phase 1: Toward mutual understanding) familiarises project partners with the problem space and then jointly frames the project boundaries from February 2023 – May 2025. The second phase (Phase 2: Toward model coproduction) involves coproducing solution-oriented knowledge that addresses the problem frame from June 2025 – November 2025. Finally, the third phase (Phase 3: Toward model co-ownership) integrates and applies the coproduced knowledge into societal and scientific practices, from December 2025 – November 2026 when the DIAMOND project finalises. 

Phase 1 is divided into three stages and the output is a set of stakeholder-informed research questions, presented in this deliverable, guiding Phase 2’s coproduction activities. Stages 1 and 2 were conducted between March and November 2023 and are presented in external page D2.4 Stakeholder-informed research questions (Briers & Vienni-Baptista 2023). Stage 3 focused on producing research questions for scenario development and assessment.  Stage 3 was designed as an engaged approach to sustain the transdisciplinary process in DIAMOND.  In Phase 2: Towards knowledge co-production, the research questions will be integrated into WP3, WP4, and WP5 that span scenario development, and assessment, and guide model development to enable the integration of newly developed scenarios into model runs.