TRANSIENCE – TRANSItioning towards an Efficient, carbon-Neutral Circular European industry

The need to approach climate action, resource efficiency, and circularity performance as integrated, economy-wide, cross-cutting issues is growingly gaining attention in the policy world, stimulating the development of new industrial policies in Europe and worldwide. Currently, however, there is little progress in conceptualising the circular economy and understanding its interactions with climate action. State-of-the-art modelling capacity to capture the interplay of the two agendas and their implications for energy-intensive sectors as well as to represent the European industry’s transformation in line with the region’s vision for climate neutrality is not yet fully developed. TRANSIENCE will undertake a comprehensive characterisation and assessment of circularity principles and measures visà-vis decarbonisation, by looking at the twin transition of European industries through the lenses of global competitiveness, innovation, and holistic sustainability. It will then produce MIC3, a consistent, fully open-source model ecosystem to assess industrial circularity, decarbonisation, and sustainability. A series of interoperable modules on the socioeconomic, service and product, material, industrial, energy-system, and environmental perspectives of the transformation of European industry will be developed and integrated, building on and opening the code of leading modelling tools. MIC3 will finally be used in extensive scenario modelling to produce diverse pathways toward a material-efficient, circular, climate-neutral, sustainable European industry. Transparency, openness, and knowledge sharing will be promoted, and technical capacities will be developed in four industrial agglomerations in the EU, moving beyond stakeholder consultation, onto model co-development, continuous validation of assumptions, co-creation of scenario modelling, evaluation of the desirability and usability of the developed model and insights, and eventually co-production of science and action.