This is a summary of longer documents explaining the research project and work packages in detail. The proposal is also available as PDF one page and four page document as well as a set of presentation slides.
Available on request: A detailed 50-page version of this research proposal, comprehensively annotated with references to the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Our world has a problem: Policymakers have been focused, since the Paris Agreement of 2015, on trying to limit the increase in global average annual surface temperature to well below 2.0°C and as close to 1.5°C as possible compared to the late 19th century average (right now we are already at 1.2°C). The implicit assumption has been that 1.5°C is „safe enough.“ Unfortunately, it turns out it is not at all safe enough:

• New evidence from climate science clearly shows that stabilising even at 1.0°C would entail extremely disruptive consequences, including inexorable long-term loss of the world’s coastal cities to >10 m sea level rise, drowning London, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Jakarta, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and hundreds of other cities, as well as entire countries – e.g. nearly the whole of Vietnam and the Netherlands would disappear under the waves. The reason: Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets (GrIS and WAIS) have both already phase-shifted into physical dynamics of accelerating, self-reinforcing large-scale annual ice-mass loss.
• In addition, 1.5°C will entail more extreme heatwaves, droughts, and forest fires; heavy rains, floods, and typhoons; destabilisation of the jet stream; and the northward spread of insect vectors of extremely dangerous tropical diseases, among many other damages.

With the „Back to the Holocene“ research project, we offer a key piece of the solution: an advanced tool for specifying realistically feasible, carefully calibrated technological pathways from the brink of disaster back to safety by reaching a global CO₂ level similar to that which prevailed during the Holocene era, i.e. the era of relatively stable climate and sea level since the end of the last Ice Age – the era during which human civilisation developed and our great cities were built. The question we pose is: Can the world simultaneously deliver sustainable energy abundance for everyone, leaving no-one behind, and regain climate safety by returning atmospheric CO₂ back well below today’s levels, far enough and soon enough to stabilize sea level and conserve our coastal cities and lowlands? If so, how can this be achieved in infrastructure terms, in well-calibrated technological detail? What equipment needs to be built, by when, in what quantities? What are the least-cost and best solutions?

• The purpose of LUT’s new „Back to the Holocene“ research project is to provide detailed, scientifically well-founded calculations of cost-optimised technology pathways for simultaneously achieving renewable energy abundance and net negative annual CO₂ emissions in every world region.
• These pathways would, if implemented, see the world exceed 1.5°C for as few years as possible, and restore a safer global climate by returning atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to levels well below those of today, by later this century (potentially re-stabilising Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets), while delivering energy prosperity in every region by drawing on abundant renewable energy resources.
• Our research aims are guided by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 7, access to modern sustainable energy for all, and SDG 13, urgent climate action.

The „Back to the Holocene“ research project will explore these twin aims in detail. With LUT-ESTM 2.0, we will provide least-cost technology pathways for simultaneously achieving sustainable energy abundance and net negative annual CO₂ emissions, as follows:

This research project will further develop one of the world’s most respected and sophisticated Energy System Transition Modelling environments, LUT-ESTM, which received the highest rating from among ten globally leading energy systems models from independent evaluators. This ESTM has already allowed us to calculate cost-optimised technology pathways to net zero emissions by 2050 or 2040 for individual countries, for Europe, and for the world as a whole. Our research based on LUT-ESTM is the basis of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles published since 2015, including in top journals such as Nature, Joule, and Science. See Google Scholar search results here. See Scopus search results here.

Our energy systems modelling research has found that because of steep unit price declines in solar PV, energy storage technologies, and electrolysers over the past decade – trends that are projected to continue – an abundant renewable energy based economy that leaves no-one behind is coming into focus as a technologically and financially realistic mid-future prospect. In addition, IPCC Reports are in consensus that carbon dioxide removal technologies must soon be deployed at very large scale to restore a safe and stable climate, by achieving net negative annual CO₂ emissions.

• Climate scientists will provide us with best estimates of „safe enough“ atmospheric CO₂ targets for 2050, 2100, and 2150 (e.g. 450 ppm CO₂ by 2050, 350 ppm by 2100, 300 ppm by 2150). These targets can be turned into aggregate CO₂ removal budgets (e.g. net removal of 1200 Gt CO₂ over the years 2040-2100) and thence into net negative annual CO₂ emissions trajectories, set as boundary constraints on the cost-optimising LUT-ESTM 2.0 model’s calculations.
• Global, regional, and local implementations of LUT-ESTM 2.0 will generate detailed quantitative estimates, calculated in five-year time-steps, of cost-optimised combinations of more than 120 technologies in energy, energy storage, heating, transport, industry, seawater desalination, and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) sectors that can achieve these climate-science-driven carbon targets.
• These combinations will identify pathways to future energy-industry-CDR infrastructure that deliver sustainable energy abundance as well as net negative emissions in any given region.
• LUT-ESTM features hourly resolution (hourly matching of energy supply and demand), sector coupling (energy flows between sectors), and inclusion of Power-to-X technologies that allow use of sustainable electricity to produce fossil-free e-fuels and e-chemicals.
• These features are necessary for an energy system model to generate technologically detailed, cost-optimised, realistic local, regional, or national technology pathways to a sustainable energy future.
• For technical reasons, none of these features are included in sufficient detail to enable their use for regional planning purposes in the simpler, coarser-resolution energy models embedded within Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used in the preparation of IPCC reports.
• IAMs, which include climate and land use as well as energy model components, are intended to give broad overviews of global climate risk and energy trends, not specific regional or national energy systems planning guidance. LUT-ESTM 2.0 can provide that guidance, and so has a different purpose that complements rather than competes with the role of IAMs.

LUT-ESTM already features by far the highest level of geographic resolution of any ESTM, featuring 9 major regions subdivided into ca. 48 macro regions and 145 meso-scale regions. LUT-ESTM 2.0 will further subdivide the world into 800+ regions corresponding to administrative units such as federal states or provinces. This will make LUT-ESTM 2.0 directly useful to regional energy system planners, investors, and researchers.

• The model’s detailed local and regional data sets (featuring infrastructure; renewable energy resources; carbon sequestration potential; demographics) will be nested and interconnected, allowing researchers and energy systems planners to zoom in and out of different levels, from local to regional to global – an unprecedented ability that no existing ESTM features.
• This zoomable high-resolution modelling environment will enable researchers and energy systems planners to map out cost-optimised transition pathways to prosperous, highly renewable energy systems futures, within their wider regionally interconnected energy system context. This is a major innovation in energy-industry-CDR systems research.

Implementation in LUT-ESTM 2.0 of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and estimates of their unit cost degressions, with the geographically specific potential of each technology quantified – and the CDR systems‘ energy and materials requirements specified – will allow us to provide detailed regional pathways beyond net-zero annual CO₂ emissions that will, if implemented, achieve net resequestration (net negative annual emissions). With this, we can chart a least-cost high-prosperity global pathway back down to 350 ppm and below. This too is an unprecedented and very useful research innovation of the Back to the Holocene research project.

We believe this project will have game-changing impact. Our research to date has shown that highly renewable energy based pathways to global or regional net-zero annual emissions can be achieved at cost parity or better, compared to business as usual. Our next research phase can show the least-cost path to climate safety even as it generates much more geographically detailed pathways to sustainable energy prosperity, region by region.

• LUT-ESTM 2.0’s impact will be multiplied by creating and disseminating a tutorials- and training-supported Open Source version, so that other research groups can join in implementing and refining the model for various countries and regions, in accordance with local priorities. Their results will contribute to building a highly detailed global dataset.
• LUT-ESTM 2.0 will be very useful to national and regional energy system planners because the development of regional technology deployment scenarios using the freeware version can help improve the coordinated targeting of hundreds of billions of euros in spending on clean electricity generation, heat, transport, industry, seawater desalination, and CDR infrastructures.
• This energy-industry-CDR infrastructure transition pathway optimisation tool and the information it generates will help shape international discourse on energy, climate, and industrial policy. Among other things, our research will provide key input to future IPCC Assessment Reports exploring pathways to climate safety. Ambitious climate goals become more feasible when decisionmakers know in advance, in detail, the dimensions and costs of the challenges before us – and see they’re manageable.

Funding is needed to carry out the next phase of research, including for:

• Development of LUT-ESTM 2.0, adding new energy storage and CDR technologies and increasing the model’s geographic resolution from 145 meso-scale regions to >800 local regions.
• Creation of several major energy and carbon transition scenarios for achieving both energy abundance and climate safety, covering the periods 2020s-2100 and 2100-2150.
• Covering the costs of preparing a tutorial-supported freeware version of LUT-ESTM 2.0 and all its datasets, which will be given as a gift to the global climate and energy research community, so that researchers and energy system planners around the world will be better equipped to chart a safe and prosperous path through the 21st century.
• WP1. New Technologies,
  Adding new technologies to LUT-ESTM, including several carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR) such as CO₂ direct air capture, carbon mineralisation, afforestation, soil sequestration, biochar carbon from sustainable biomass sources, bioenergy carbon capture and storage, and storage technologies such as underground hydrogen storage options, detailed pumped hydro energy storage potentials.
• WP2. Nested Regional Datasets
  Further refining the geographic resolution of LUT-ESTM from 145 meso-scale regions to 800+ local regions, with nested datasets to enable zooming in and out between local- meso- macro- and major-scale regions.
• WP3. Back to the Holocene Pathways,
  Preparation of combined global net-zero-emissions energy technology transition pathways and net-negative-emissions carbon dioxide removal pathways that, together, are consistent with returning atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to a non-dangerous target level before 2100 or 2150 (between 350 and 280 ppm CO₂, with a variety of target scenarios to be defined by collaborating climate scientists), including regional technology pathway scenarios developed for each of the following large regions: Europe, North America, South America, Africa, China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, as well as a high-level model instantiation for the world. WP3 will include model intercomparisons, because in complex systems modelling it is important to test model robustness and results plausibility by running different models from different research groups with the same set of input data and system constraints, to see how the structures of the models influence results. Model intercomparisons for T<<1.5ºC scenarios will be organised with at least one other energy systems model: PyPSA (Tom Brown at Technical University of Berlin). Model intercomparison collaborations will also be sought with IAM modellers at PIK, IIASA and PBL, developers of three of the most important IAMs used by IPCC.
• WP4. Open Science Freeware Preparation,
  Preparing LUT-ESTM and related datasets for Open Source/ Open Data/ Open Science release, with tutorials (text and video) and workshop formats to lower barriers to entry and increase uptake.
• WP5. Financing and Socio-political factors for implementation,
  Generating ideas for financing and considering socio-political factors analogous to the climate justice debate and to develop recommendations for action. Climate science teaches that knowledge does not necessarily lead to action.
• WP6. Dissemination,
  Dissemination of LUT-ESTM 2.0 to external institutional users, and communication of scenario results to key stakeholders around the world. This will include many peer-reviewed scientific publications and corresponding media impact, as well as a free-to-download textbook hosted by a major scientific publisher, covering the LUT-ESTM methods and key findings.

We are looking forward to finding funding partners who share our passion for and commitment to the grand challenge of bringing into being a win-win pathway to both climate safety and energy prosperity.

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