Welcome to ACHIEVE’s first newsletter!

For the next 3.5 years, the Horizon Europe project ACHIEVE will develop a comprehensive set of high-integrity principles and criteria for voluntary climate action, and generate new and transformative scientific insights to strengthen, guide, and scale up high-integrity voluntary climate action that contributes to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century in line with the Paris Agreement.

In this newsletter, we present you the ACHIEVE project, our consortium, a summary of the topics discussed at our first webinar on Promoting High Integrity Voluntary Climate Action, an overview of our first in-person meeting in Radboud University, and our recently published paper and blog items.

Enjoy the read!

The key strengths of our consortium are conducting interdisciplinary climate research, providing advice for policymakers, and closely engaging with stakeholders. The consortium consists of twelve members and builds on the academic excellence of its members, who have been at the forefront of research into the role and impact of voluntary climate action, including, world-leading scenario and modeling teams, social science and humanities scholars with strong expertise on the role of voluntary climate action across different governance contexts, and tracking and assessing voluntary climate action in terms of integrity-related questions such as on climate ambition and impact, equity, justice, accountability and legitimacy.

Find out more: https://achieveproject.eu/about/project-consortium

During ACHIEVE’s meeting, we discussed the progress of different work streams within ACHIEVE and shaped our project's content and approach. In two workshops, we dedicated time to key topics at the foundation of our project: the dimensions and principles of integrity in voluntary climate action, and the stakeholder engagement platform with which we aim to facilitate the co-creation of useful, timely, and actionable results for different stakeholders.

The “Integrity in Voluntary Climate Action” workshop brought together researchers and practitioners of the ACHIEVE project to deliberate and co-create dimensions and indicators to guide the integrity of voluntary climate action. The discussion focused on the social, ecological, ethical, and progress-oriented dimensions of voluntary climate action and their indicators, exploring how they integrate theory and practice for change-making.

Key takeaways for further defining high integrity principles and indicators:

• We emphasized that simplifying and prioritizing dimensions of integrity, especially goal-oriented approaches, and distinguishing between substantive and procedural aspects are important.
• We identified missing aspects related to e.g. governance, adaptability, and diverse worldviews.
• We suggested using both quantitative and qualitative indicators, raising questions about universal agreements and varying perspectives on integrity.

ACHIEVE aims to develop a platform for stakeholder engagement, which will present actionable results on opportunities to strengthen and scale up high-integrity voluntary climate action. Additionally, data, assumptions and outcomes of the work packages will be synthesized and integrated into the platform. During the workshop, we started to design the ACHIEVE platform.

Our first public webinar presented the concept and working program of ACHIEVE. In total we touched upon the following topics:

• What are the latest developments in Voluntary Climate Actions from SB60 to COP29?
• How the transition from fossil fuels can accelerate?
• What are the priorities of COP29?
• How can climate initiatives cooperate?
• What is the role of Alliances for Climate Action (ACAs) in integrity principles?
• How is integrity understood in different countries?

Contributors of the webinar included Ian Tout and Tamaki Takao (UNFCCC Secretariat), Thomas Hale (University of Oxford), Takeshi Kuramochi (NewClimate Institute), and Luli Pesqueira (WWF). The meeting was moderated by the project coordinators Birka Wicke and Sander Chan, Radboud University.

The webinar was attended by 45 people, and it is available on ACHIEVE’s YouTube channel:

Many sector-level cooperative initiatives involving both national governments and non-state actors were launched around the 2021 Glasgow climate conference (COP26). However, there have been questions about whether and to what extent these initiatives could substantially contribute to achieving the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. To this end, a new paper by Kuramochi et al. in Npj Climate Action examines the prospects of the 14 Glasgow sector initiatives by investigating their aggregate mitigation ambition under current national signatories and the institutional robustness of each initiative.

Read more:

Kuramochi, T., Deneault, A., Chan, S. et al. Supporting the Paris Agreement through international cooperation: potential contributions, institutional robustness, and progress of Glasgow climate initiatives. npj Clim. Action 3, 31 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00106-4

Asset managers, asset owners, and other financial institutions manage much of the capital required to transition to low-carbon economies globally, but can we rely on them as financiers of change? Evidence from Reclaim Finance, Urgewald, and Greenpeace shows that even financial institutions committed to net-zero initiatives under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) continue to invest billions of dollars in fossil fuels through both stocks and bonds, not to mention providing other services like underwriting and insurance.

Why do financial institutions continue to back fossil fuel expansion, which is clearly not in line with the Paris Agreement nor with many financial institutions’ own net-zero targets?

Read more: https://newclimate.org/news/net-zero-or-zero-sense-three-reasons-to-rethink-financial-institutions-voluntary-targets

Voluntary climate actions by non-state actors—such as companies and cities—have become a vital part of the global response to climate change. These actions could help tackle some of the biggest global challenges, including achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century while enabling sustainable development globally. However, the full potential of voluntary climate actions can only be achieved when integrity of these actions is ensured. Integrity concerns relate to issues like the quality and credibility of carbon credits, greenwashing, transparency gaps, and inconsistent reporting. In this blog post, we describe the context of the ACHIEVE project, and its aim to increase integrity of voluntary climate action.

Read more: https://www.achieveproject.eu/news/fragmented-commitments-and-pledges-cohesive-force-high-integrity-climate-action

ACHIEVE participated in the META BUILD & WeForming Workshop on the 2^nd of October 2024 in order to establish the foundation for collaboration and joining forces to create a real impact and accelerate the energy transition in Europe. By combining expertise, the projects aim to demonstrate the critical role of cooperation in advancing sustainable energy solutions.

ACHIEVE presented first project outcomes and policy-relevant messages to European Commission staff and policy officers as part of a clustering event organized for Horizon Europe’s Cluster 5 Destination 1 on climate sciences and responses for the transformation towards climate neutrality. Three key messages from our research so far:

• A mapping of cooperative climate initiatives indicates that the effectiveness of initiatives has decreased since 2018. ACHIEVE recommends increased attention being paid to the legitimacy of net-zero claims and widening the policy focus from net-zero to also other climate commitments so that also their credibility can be ensured.
• Emission coverage by signatories of initiatives launched at COP26 is limited, the institutional robustness of initiatives varies widely, and only few governments followed up on their commitment. Important follow-ups for the initiatives are setting up robust governance frameworks, and for government signatories to reflect the initiative goals in their next NDCs.
• A synthesis of voluntary initiatives by financial institutions points to the need of binding regulations to provide incentives for financial institutions to align their investment behavior.

ACHIEVE’s members Sander Chan (Radboud University), Sebastian Reyes de la Ranza (Radboud University) and Lauri Peterson, (University of Eastern Finland) will take part in the international, scientific WCSG conference “Governing, sustainability transformations: Changing drivers, driving change” (16-18 October) in Wageningen, the Netherlands.

Send us an email for any questions or to express interest in the ACHIEVE research.

You received this email because you expressed your interest in getting informed on ACHIEVE news via our online subscription form, or meeting us in an event, or via e-mail.

If you are no longer interested in receiving our news you may 
Unsubscribe